I feel for you… Based on earlier posts, if Sense didn’t get right at the initial pairing with the Hue, you’re going to need to wait for a build that has the ability to do pairing updates. But to be clear, the first release only respects Hue rooms, not groups so if you use both groups and rooms in Hue-land, you are likely to see unpredictable results.
I would be much happier if Sense showed individual bulbs instead of lumping all the bulbs by room.
–Harry
I’m going to move this to main v22 thread so we can better track these issues all in one place.
Ultimately, both modes could lead to frustration. We went with room-based because it seems the most common use case. Individual bulb control may come in the future. For users who have ceiling fans with 4 bulbs or a bunch of recessed lighting, individual control there would be frustrating (as it was for me before I realized I could group accessories in HomeKit. I have two ceiling fans in my combined living room/dining room and turning 8 bulbs on manually was a pain).
@scorp508 , I’ve passed your reports on. It definitely sounds like some weird room/group sync issue. You’re only using the Hue app to control your lights? No weird music-sync apps or HomeKit or Elgato Home? I have something like 5 apps that can control my Hue lights and it throws off sync constantly. I now barely touch the Hue app and mainly stick to HomeKit because I just get sync errors whenever I go back into Hue…and this was before the Sense integration.
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I have all sorts of stuff paired with Hue. Alexa, a HomeSeer plug-in, Huelloween, Hue Lights, hueDynamic, Light DJ, HomeKit. All of them seem to be respecting the room setups. Most of my interaction with Hue is via Alexa and HomeSeer, I rarely open the Hue app itself.
When I go into the room setup within the Hue app I don’t have any warnings about sync issues. The only time I’ve ever seen those messages in the past is when rooms were out of sync with HomeKit, which I do not use even though it’s there in the background.
I also have an Entertainment Area defined in the Hue app. I wonder if the fact that the Entertainment Area is the same name “Family Room” as one of the room groups has anything to do with it. What’s the best way to make Sense forget and re-learn Hue devices? I could go change the entertainment area name and re-pair.
So…we’re actually still ironing out that functionality but should have a patch coming early next week.
@hmueller can you just clarify something for me. When you say:
you mean that even when you just turn a single light on, Sense is still showing you wattage figures equivalent to all of the bulbs in the room being on? That should not be happening. It should only be calculating the wattage for a single bulb.
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Sense shows the correct wattage used, just sees them all as the same bulb.
–Harry
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Sense shows the correct wattage for one, two, three, or four bulbs but labels them all the same. I can turn them on one by one using the Hue app or HomeKit, just not with Sense.
–Harry
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Ryan,
Room based would be fine in many cases but when I’m turning on the light on my nightstand and Sense is turning on my wife’s nightstand, a floor lamp, and the overhead lights… lets just say that my wife wasn’t appreciative.
Honestly, aside from rooms where the only Hue bulbs are in overhead fixtures (grouped together in a single virtual fixture) I am rarely turning on every light in the room, If the overhead light is on I don’t need the light on the end table or the floor lamp. I bought my Sense to help me reduce my power consumption, turning on every bulb in a room doesn’t accomplish that.
I’m hoping that the ability to light up a whole room OR specific bulbs comes soon. In the meantime I’ll have to stick with HomeKit or the Hue app to allow more “surgical” approach to turning on or off lights.
–Harry
Ah, ok. I understand now. We do plan to add individual bulb support in the future, I just can’t guarantee a timeframe.
I’ll add that the Hue integration was never meant to replace your Hue app or your related apps for Hue control. Hue and other apps (I’m a HomeKit fan myself) excel at control. We included control functionality primarily for the more incidental times where you happen to be in Sense and notice that a light is on that shouldn’t be. Still, even in that use case, individual bulb support would be helpful.
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It worked but there was one issue. Prior to linking with hue, my Sense had recognized AC but after linking with Hue , AC is now clubbed with others and doesn’t show AC as a separate item anymore. Don’t know why.
Also would you consider linking with Wink hub? Most of my electric switches are linked to Wink hub. Would love to see Sense linked to Wink hub. Thanks.
Understood. I’m sure you recognize that the geeks and nerds among us have to press every button to see what it does.
From a energy use monitoring standpoint being able to break the individual bulbs out is much more helpful than knowing how much energy a room used.
I’m looking forward to being able to do this.
Thanks,
Harry
Have to add my two cents for Sense here. @HilarioAtSense The 8w bulbs keep getting mentioned sarcasticly…but I have more than 150 light bulbs in the house. So yes…I appreciate and am excited about the ability to track and monitor my bulbs energy usage. Please keep at it.
With that being said…I’m having difficulty in getting the integration to work. Also, if the app is really only going to let you add one Hue bridge…then only 1/3 of my lights will be added, since I have 3 bridges. I hope you will consider working on adding multiple bridges. Any good sized house is going to have more than the 50 bulb limit per bridge. Especially if there are chandelier fixtures. One bridge is perfect for an apartment…but not family home.
If I had to pick on the new feature…I’d say that the ability to turn lights on and off from the Sense app won’t be real useful for me. There are far better tools and automation to do that.
Update. AC is now again appearing as separate item. So the issue raised in earlier post doesn’t exist anymore.
I love this Hue integration. It meets my expectations.
Consider Wink…Wink…Wink integration please 
Provide mechanism for users to label the activities/items as detected by Sense. It would help to crowdsource labeling. There is a potential of bad labeling but it would help at least manage their own devices. Thanks.
What do you mean by “for users to label the activities/items as detected by Sense” ? I’m sure Sense could label the Hue devices as “detected by Sense integration” so we could see via some special icon that tells that it is somewhat special. And you do notice that the Hue integration devices don’t give the option of either selecting a crowdsourced names or an option to say “device not on”, since Sense definitively know the device(s) is on.
Why would you want to manually label, again ? You can still change the details like the name, make, model and location on the details card, but why would you want to if the Hue information passed to Sense is correct ?
cpachris1969: I use LED bulbs too, just not Hues I have the Lutron system. So at any one time, how many bulbs are really on? Just curious. 150? 50? The reason I ask is to determine, realistically, how much of an impact it will actually make. I probably don’t have 150 bulbs in my whole house but even if I did, at any one time I probably have 10-15 on max and that’s if the 8 LEDs in the kitchen are on. So for me, that’s 80-120 watts of usage. A lot, but not even as much as my home a/v system. And if you can’t track more than 50/150 (multiple bridges? mentioned elsewhere) which I read about then that even less of an impact.
I’m guessing if you have 150 bulbs in your house you have some motion detected lights outside your house too. I hope those are Hues as those outdoor lights consume electricity at an alarming rate. My garage light is the only light (non led) that Sense has detected because it uses so much light. I actually have not converted it to LED as I like that sense has detected it and can notify me if it’s on. Sense would probably not detect it if I switched to LED.
Wick: Curious, do your cars charge basis a timer (like start charging at 2:00am or something?) The reason I ask is that with two cars maybe Sense is getting confused. I have a large device which has settings A/B which I turn on with a timer. Sense recognizes it if I schedule it with Setting A. Setting B it won’t recognize for whatever reason. Both use about 800W/hour.
Lol…there are probably times when every stinking light in the house is on. Family of 5. Everybody plays in their own space. So there are times when I might have more than 1,000 watts being pulled by my lights. It will definitely improve my awareness if these were not all grouped into ‘Other’ or ‘Always On’. The current lack of ability to link to more than a single bridge will still be a limiter to me…but that is all the more reason for Sense to continue down this development thread and add multiple Hue bridge support. I’ve already seen my ‘Always On’ drop by about 300 watts since the light groupings started showing up.
I’ve converted all my outside lighting, with the exception of the landscape lighting, to Hue already.
@HilarioAtSense Requesting support for multiple Hue Bridges!
“As @kevin1 mentioned, this should please the users who are concerned about machine learning being our sole approach to device detection”
@RyanAtSense, this is good news, and it is recognition that Sense can benefit from being told exactly when a device is being turned on and off like a light bulb via the Hue bridge. This is something the Sense engineering / data science team has long told its active user community would not be beneficial. Glad to see this shift.
Since Sense is now willing to be told when specific devices are on and off to facilitate device identification - it’s time for Sense to release a ‘train new device’ interface, and allow users to turn a specific device on, running, off 10 times while telling the Sense App, “This is my AC unit ON. This is my AC unit OFF, etc” and my AC unit is this brand and model… this training exercise may not lead to 100%, immediate, device identification when you return Sense to a ‘normal / non-training’ mode’ for obvious real-world run-time variances in power consumptions - but it would certainly give Sense a leg up on 99% certain device catalogs in users homes (you can be reasonably certain I’ll input correct on/off times, product type, and model information), and what the on / off signatures look like.
Training is a much, much different issue. There’s a huge difference between an API telling Sense that something is on and a user telling Sense that something is on. The API doesn’t ‘train’ Sense, but tells Sense every single time that a device is on (in this case, an LED bulb). Training is a much different issue that involves you telling Sense that something is on enough times and in enough contexts for Sense to be able to do so on its own. That’s not an impossible feat, but it would be incredibly long winded (much more than just turning a device in and off ten times in a row). We would love to incorporate a feature like this. Why wouldn’t we? It would make the device detection process a million times easier. It’s just not feasible though. 10 manually IDed on/off cycles really doesn’t give us that much data.
I’ve written about this recently here: Why can't you train Sense? - #4