Homeseer sync - Force Naming

Questions
#1

HI, I’m using Homeseer and read a post from last year where someone was asking about how Homeseer devices are named. It confirmed what I thought which is that it’s not a single simple algorithm.

The problem I’m running into is that I created a set of virtual devices in Homeseer that get populated with current energy use on each circuit in my house - so there are around 20 virtual devices. Each virtual device has 2 features to store the actual power consumption in Watts and the apparent power in VA. The sync creates devices for each feature with names like Power, Power1, Power2, … Power19 and VA, VA1, VA2, … VA19 - so I have no idea which circuit they relate to unless I go through and look at the associated device ids and rename all of them manually.

Is there anything I can do on the HomeSeer side to force the sync to use some other piece of data from HomeSeer like the address or code field when naming these so I can have some control over the names?

#2

You can rename the devices after the sync to a more user friendly name. Ideally we would just use the HS device name but for a lot of systems I’ve worked on in the past, customers choose generic names like “Light”. So we could have say 50 devices in the system named “Light”. To fix that, Home Remote may include Location1 and/or Location2 to create a unique name for the device.

#3

The HR names are derived from 3 fields: HS Name, Location1, Location2.

What are those 3 fields for say Power, Power1, Power2? Are they all named “Power” in HS?

Sounds like they are. If that’s the case, you have 2 options:

  1. Assign them a more identifiable name in HomeSeer before you sync.

  2. Assign something to Location1 and/or Location2. Sounds like you may not have set those, or either that, they are the same for all “Power” devices. Assign unique values to those fields to help distinguish them from one another.

#4

They are not all named “Power”, but they are not unique either. The devices were setup with parent devices that are unique and then each parent device has 2 child devices (features) for Power and VA. They all have Location1=SiteSage and Location2=Energy.

So it looks like this:
SiteSage - Kitchen
— Power
— VA
SiteSage - Dining Room
— Power
— VA
SiteSage - Family Room
— Power
— VA

etc.

I decided that I didn’t really care too much about VA, so I abandoned the parent/child setup and just have devices like
SiteSage - Kitchen Power
SiteSage - Dining Room Power
SiteSage - Family Room Power

This configuration is working perfectly for me for this particular item. My question was intended to be a bit more generic, trying to understand if there was anything that could be done to “Force” THR to pull in any elements of a device name from HomeSeer. I find sometimes it will pull in Location1 & Location2, sometimes not and I couldn’t figure out the pattern.

#5

It tries to avoid creating devices with super long names so it only uses Location1 & Location2 fields when they help ensure a unique device name. If you are using Location1=SiteSage & Location2=Energy for every Power device then those fields aren’t doing anything to help ensure a unique name, so it doesn’t include them.