New bidet installed in a toilet closet. Want to use energy consumption as a trigger for controlling the exhaust fan.
I have some extra Kasa WiFi outlets in the house. Are these okay? Or are there better options?
No expert here, why not try it?
You said "outlet", but I assume you mean "smart plug".
Also, when you say "energy consumption", I assume you meant "power". You'd be looking at Watts.
I like my ZEN04's. I have a lot of them. But, if you have extras, no big deal to change out.
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If the plugs you have don’t work out, I’ve had good luck with the relatively inexpensive third reality power monitoring plugs. They’re zigbee devices.
The Kasa's have been good for me, including power / energy monitoring, the Community integration I still use and use of these in automations. I have had one go South and start switching on and off randomly.... but only one at this stage.
The other thing to keep in mind is that they require polling of their state, as opposed to Zigbee (or Z-Wave?) plugs that report their state on change. The flipside being Z-types can chatty as their state can change often.... So worth understanding the pro's and con's as much is reasonable before embarking down one path or the other...
So my suggestion would be, if you have some Kasa plugs and the devices are relatively resilent to the plug going hay-wire or cheap enough to replace, then I would go for it as a first foray into this space. Even as an addition to an existing setup, if I'm honest...
So I have the plug installed, and I can see “run time” and that increases when the toilet is in use, but how do I use that as a trigger?
Yes - smart plug
Yes - I mean Power/Watts
Trying to see if I can get my Kasa to work, but if not I very much appreciate the clarification and the ZEN04 Recommendation
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I think you're going to have to go into a little more detail about what you want to happen. It's unclear, to me at least. I thought if watts go over X, then turn on fan.
Yes that is what I want, but I don’t see the Watts variable in Hubitat to use as a trigger…
You should see something like this in the Device Details page for your plug in Hubitat. The power reading will be the number of watts it is currently drawing, i.e. 4 watts in this example. Note, I am still using the Community developed drivers, but I would expect the built-in one's to be almost identical.
When you go to use it in a rule, you may want to use something like this to check the power reading:
To do this, click on the Trigger Events, select Power meter, select your Kasa device from the list, Set the type of comparison to do and the value to compare to.
Obviously there are other ways to achieve this, apps that may make this process easier and other types of triggers or monitoring techniques available, just depends on what best suits your need.
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