How do you name Devices?

[beach]

I have a basic question that probably seems stupid, but how do most of you name devices? There is a spot for location and name. Do most of you use the location as the real location, like living room, deck, etc, and the name as the name of the device, like lights, relay switch, etc? Can you have repeats in both categories like location living room for several items, or name lights for several locations? Does this affect the way homeseer processes info, or it doesn't matter. I just want to tweak my system so it works the best it can, and I was wondering how most of you name things. Thanks.

[Rupp]

I use the location as the actual location and the device name as close to the name as I can get. So it would be like Location:Master Bedroom, Device Name: Overhead light

You can have duplicates as long as you do not want to use ExecX10ByName and accidentally turn on 2 devices at the same time. If I have multiple devices in different locations and I want them to act as one device then I only list one device like my stick lamps that are located in the Living Room and TV Room. I simply have one device and one location but both lamps use the same house and unit codes.

[beach]

Thanks rupp.

[JeffCharger]

I too have applied this approach. But I have also rethought this. How do you "group" functional components together. For example, security devices. I like to see all security devices together and sometimes wish that I had used the "location" identifier as a logical grouping of devices.

[beach]

I know. I wish there was another field to group similar items like lights, security, etc. That's why I asked. I thought someone might know a trick.

[bdickhaus]

I do both. I have lights, fans, etc. grouped by location. But other devices grouped by function. I also use a house code to group function, for example, all my motion detectors are on house code B, all of my lights are on house code J, all of my fans on house code E; and they are all also grouped by location.

Bill

[Rick Tinker]

Actually, we have a feature on the drawing board for HS 2.0 that will add the ability to put a device into two locations. Thus, you can have a device named perhaps "Family Room Light", which would be useful in both ASR and viewing just the family room devices on the web page, but also it could be a member of "First Floor" so that you can view the First Floor location and see all of the devices on your first floor.

The feature has not been done yet, but as I said it is slated for 2.0.

[Blade]

Rick,

That would be awesome. I would love to see that option added.

[Rupp]

Guys,
One trick I use to get devices that are in the same group to line up in the GUI is to use a prefix on the device type like CM Camera this way all of my cameras are listed back to back in the GUI.

[GenevaDude]

I try to group my devices, in some cases, to events. For example I have a few devices especially related to events using "DuskDawn" as the name or location.
These devices have locations of DuskDawn. Events are in group DuskDawn.
In other cases I try to set the location to the purpose or room.

[Jim'll]

I do not use rooms but catagories the lights are in zones like
Upstairs lights, downstairs lights then Appliance, security, system etc