What to expect with two garage door openers of the same make & model?

Our two-car garage has the same Chamberlain garage door opener in each bay operating the same style garage door.

My wife parks in one garage bay and the other door isn’t used very often as I park outside. Sense properly learned the garage door opener for the door my wife uses. I was doing some work yesterday that necessitated opening the other door. When I opened the other door Sense notified me that my wife’s garage door was on. I reported the device as “not on.” When I closed that door a few minutes later Sense did not say my wife’s garage door opener was running (good!).

I then wondered if I had made a mistake by reporting the device as not on. Am I expecting too much to be able to distinguish between two essentially identical devices? I’m sure they have subtle differences as each unit ages and the cycles counts between the two become more distant, but generally speaking they must have similar patterns.

Sense is still correctly telling us when her garage door opener is running. Should I expect Sense to outright ignore the other opener as a device or might it make another attempt at identifying it as something? I haven’t cycled that particular door any more since this initial interaction. Looking back I don’t think there’s any huge penalty to living with merging the two as one common “Garage Door Openers” device, but curious to hear what other people in a similar situation have ended up with.

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I think it will pick them up as a single device. I have two identical water heaters, one of which is used rarely. When it comes on, it is detected as the other water heater that is used daily.

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I also have two Chamberlin’s (great door openers!), and Sense hasn’t found either one in over a year. Since monitoring access into the garage was one of the values Sense was supposed to be able to provide, that’s disappointing, but I am glad to hear that it might find them at some point.

@andy, I don’t know if it will inspire you or not, but these are models built in September 2003 and then installed when a previous owner added the garage to the home. :slight_smile:

When I open the light cover where the adjustment controls are the opener’s part number is 41A583B.

All three of my circa 1998 Chamberlains (Liftmaster 1246Rs) are detected as the same thing. Think they were easily and reliably detected because they are older, simpler models. The downside is that Sense really can’t tell the difference between the three of them. BTW - they each add about 9W to my always on power just by being plugged in…

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Similar model here. Good to know about the standby power use.

If you want them to be detected differently, maybe you could place an incandescent bulb in the one seldom used, so that when it comes on, the detection might look a bit different.

Another possibility, is moving the two power sockets to opposite breaker phases if possible. I don’t know if Sense checks this, but I suspect it should.

Nice idea. Though my desire for symmetry may kill me a little on the inside every time it comes on. :smiley:

Good thinking, but not currently possible for our home. All of the receptacles in the attached garage are the same circuit and there’s a master suite above the garage preventing an easy way to drop a new line in from above to the ceiling.

I may just live with them as one device if Sense finds the other one again. About the only advantage I could think of having them separate was if one started to die I may see a higher wattage use from more resistance. I could still see it in the “all as one” view and pay attention to which door just opened if that starts happening. Or maybe if one did start to decay it would peel off as its own device due to a change in electrical signature.

@scorp508 The health monitoring point you raise is important in the long term potential benefits of Sense. Unless the two motors are at opposite ends of the tolerance in terms of start up characteristics, it’s unlikely they’ll be identified separately.

Your NOT ON ping is not used by machine learning yet, just fed in a dataset to the engineers, so no harm done.

I can think of ways to help Sense distinguish between two identical appliances on the same circuit, for instance by slightly modifying the start-up power characteristics (as seen by Sense) of one of them by adding an LC filter of some sort in the line. If the appliance is plug-in and never unplugged, that would work with a plug-in adaptor between the appliance and the supply. Something for the Product guys at Sense to think about, hence pinging @BradAtSense

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Yes, when this garage was added two 1-gang j-boxes were put in the ceiling directly above each opener with a pair of NEMA 5-15R receptacles. Each opener is plugged in via power cord.

I have a craftsman that is probably from around 2001 that operates our two car spot. When we added an opener to the one car spot about four years ago, it was a Liftmaster. My sense can’t tell the difference between them either but I not too concerned with it. It’s very accurate with them both individually, only when I push both buttons at the same time, it thinks it’s the dishwasher lol.

@Mcraeh, I guess we now know who makes Craftsman garage door openers :slightly_smiling_face:

Lol I knew they were the same company, I was just surprised they were so identical in the ten years between one and the other. Good thing though because my wifi controller works great on both :slight_smile:

The motors used the garage doors haven’t changed in a long time. What has changed is encryption to make openers more secure, and some newer openers have better connectivity options - like built-in WiFi.

I have identical dual garage doors from 1998 and Sense recognized them as the same device. I gave in to that limitation, and get notifications when either door opens - no distinguishing between the two.

We have a total of 5 OH garage door openers. They are all PowerMaster brand. One dates back to the mid 80s, two from the late 80s (identical), and two more from the mid 90s (identical). It detects the first one as it’s own, the late 80s as one, and the mid 90s as one. That was fine, it let me know roughly which doors were operated. The only thing that throws me off is the drill press also gets picked up as the late 80s door opener. The drill press is from circa 2012. I tried deleting the drill press and late 80s door openers. Sense found them again (quickly) as the same.

I have two older Genie Intellicode openers, I have not looked at what happens when I open both at the same time but sense picked them up and accounts for the power usage as 1 device and I am ok with that. Still waiting on some more important devices to get recognized.

Sense just detected my new LiftMaster Premium garage door openers after about 1 months of operation. All three openers detected as the same at the same time. Makes sense given they are the same model.

We have two, also identical, being used multiple times per day, and Sense didn’t find them in 16 months and counting, so be very happy

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Probably luck and a fairly clean circuit - I think our garage doors are on their own dedicated circuit. The new ones are LiftMaster Model 8355W, if that helps anybody.