Thats what I thought concerning the ZOOZ plug and now that I know its the PowerH your app references to, I can watch that. I appreciate your recommendations and have put the threshold values to the default setting when I installed your app. Also changed from 30sec to 1 hour reporting. I'm now working on the zoos plug and different loads from different equipment, so far nothing is moving that PowerH. Wonder if I exclude the ZOOS and re include would help?
Update- even a hair dryer isnt registering! Got to be defective plug - I'm gonna try and exclude and re join and see if that helps
You can leave it at 30 seconds for NOW... my comment was to encourage you to adjust it LATER, when it's reporting properly.. and why I think that way. As I said.. 30 seconds is OK for debugging.
The various options around 'reporting' can be very confusing. I think they are to satisfy various specific needs. It can be set to report 'by Increment' or 'by percentage" or 'by time'. It seems to me for most of MY things, I just want one of those. In fact I added the 'deadman timer' just for that reason.. what if I didn't get multiple reports of zero? If I set to report either on Watts or %, then when it falls to zero (done) I only get one report. The 'by time' value duplicates my deadman, in that it would report zero every 1 mins... but it's all day, all night. I don't really want all those useless reports. So, again, for ME.. I try to turn off everything EXCEPT the report that feeds the app, and let the app do the work. But it's so specific to the particular machines we use. Mine are very old so they can't even imagine "energy efficient". They are probably 10 years older than the entire concept.
Totally understand. Definitely think its the zooz plug. Like I mentioned previously, I attached a hair dryer to the plug and no reading in the device for PowerH or ANYTHING.
Do you think excluding and including the plug again back into Hubitat might help?
Wouldn't hurt, but probably won't help. If you are getting readings at all and can turn the device on/off from Hubitat, you know the Z-Wave is working. But did you check that the driver was "Zooz Power Switch"? The native on in Hubitat?
Totally concur. If I recall correctly, I struggled with coming up with the right threshold-based settings, and left it at 30 seconds until I could play with it some more.
As I mentioned to Tony, but maybe didn't emphasize, a good first step before coming up with settings is to look at the power events over the course of a couple loads of laundry to get to know your washer better.
Side note to Tony .. he's watching Power (wattage at time of report), not PowerH (maximum observation). It's just that if PowerH is zero that tells you that it has never read anything but zero since the power monitoring was last reset.
No Hal, you definitely told me those setting are a start and that I'd have to monitor my washer and the power setting to adjust to the correct setting- YA DID GOOD lolo.
OK, I had it and I'm sure Hal and csteele have too lolo. Just got return authorization from Amazon and replacing defective ZOOZ. New replacement do July 7th.Just excluded the ZOOZ from Hubitat. I have all my notes from you both so HOPEFULLY all will go well when it arrives. MANY thanks for all your help! Tony
I don’t have one of these, but if you had to change to the correct driver in HE (after adding the Zooz), did you hit “configure” on the device page to enable the power capabilities of the Outlet?
Oh yes. Thats been pounded into me but always good to be reminded. When a hair dryer didnt register a power reading, I knew it had to be a defective device. Actually I was surprised when it came from Amazon. They originally said it would come July 2nd then a day later it said will arrive June 28th plus it came in its original manufactures box unsealed. I think it was a return
I've been toying with this and have an idea for an enhancement to Better Laundry Monitor which might help. Please humor me while I think out loud:
Power monitors that are set to short intervals (say, 30 seconds or a minute) get chatty, putting load on ZWave as well as the hub. Having the washer power monitor report every short interval generates this traffic 24x7, even though there are only a few times a week that this data is interesting.
For my washer, there are frequent observations of near zero power during a wash cycle such that I have found it necessary to have 30 seconds intervals at 4 observations to prevent false positives. This means I get notified 1:30 - 2 minutes after cycle is actually complete. Were I to increase the interval, it would take longer to notify me.
So simple .. change to threshold monitoring instead. Only get power reports when there is a change of 5 watts or more. This works brilliantly when the washer isn't running .. no reports. And it accurately detects washer startup.
The problem is detecting end of cycle. It only drops to near zero at end of cycle once. But you still need multiple observations to prevent false positives. It cannot tell end of cycle this way (until deadman timer expires).
Proposal: Have a parameter in Better Laundry that dynamically adjusts the reporting frequency of the power monitor it is watching to go into "high resolution" when in cycle, and is restore to "low resolution" when cycle ends. At cycle start, send command to power monitor to report every x seconds. At cycle end, either restore setting remembered from start of cycle, or set to every y time/no report when cycle end is detected. This way, the power monitor generates frequent events, but only when necessary to monitor the cycle. Otherwise, it stays relatively quiet.
Do we see any flaws in this logic? I'm going to experiment by implementing this via RM, but think it would be a useful addition to Better Laundry.
First, I have the exact same problem but with my dryer. My washer is perfect. The biggest flaw I see in your logic is there is no standard way to do this. First, some drivers won't even have the ability to to change this setting -- it's not configurable on every device. And even if they do, most of them require you to set a preference, then call configure(). There is no way to set a device preference from an app. There would need to be a command in the driver like setReportingFrequency() you could call, then each driver would need to implement this command. So while it's an interesting idea, I don't see how you could do it in a generic way that would work for everyone. If you're looking to make a one-off for yourself, then yeah this sounds reasonable. Just add a custom command to whatever driver you use and call that.
Well that didn't take long. Thanks for the feedback. I should have done a rapid prototype of this in RM first, and I would have discovered it can't even be done there. Setting preferences isn't a custom action available for the Zooz power meter.
Maybe the idea will trigger some other approach. It really would solve an issue if a power meter could be made to report more frequently while the kettle is boiling.
I think I read that something like this was possible using TP-LINK power monitoring outlets (which I don’t have). Maybe @djgutheinz could shed some light on this?
Yes. All the TP-Link swith and plug drivers have the ability to do onOff or PowerPolling (dependent on device energy monitor mode). The two TP-Link switches that have EM functions are the HS110 (single outlet, 15 Amp max) and the HS300 (six outlets, 15 Amp total for all outlets). These are kind of limited to gas dryers since most electric dryers pull more that 15 amps and use 220V power circuit (in US).
I have set it up as a command where 0 is off and valid settings are from 5 seconds to what you want. They update the attribute (power or switch) when there is a change (power is buffered at +/- 5 watt change to avoid a LOT of send event commands).
Usage using rules:
(do not ask me about rules)
When starting dryer, use the standard refresh (set to 5 minutes) to kick off the light. When power is above a threshhold (say 100 watts), it would turn the light on yellow - meaning a dry cycle is in process.
In a rule, turn on the power monitor to (example) 10 seconds.
Monitor the attribute power and when it falls below a threshhold (say 30 watts), turn the bulb to red (meaning you have a chore to complete). Then send an off command to the dryer power poll function by setting to 0.
Caution. On the HS300, monitor power on more than one switch can cause WiFi errors and may impact overall hub performance This is caused by the single physical device being bombarded by six Hubitat devices. (I am working on trying to fix this using a parent-child driver set for the multi-plugs.) By definition, a 5 second poll cycle means that the hub has to handle 720 wifi commands per hour for the device. That is a lot communications plus the follow-on parsing.
OK , received new ZOOZ plug and NOW reporting power, unlike the the first defective one. BLM seems to be working but needs a little tweaking. My washer, when wash is done, turns on an LED green light. Apparently that uses 1.48 watts as shown in ZOOZ screen and screwing up BLM. My question is, in the POWER THRESHOLD settings of Better Laundry Monitor for "stop cycle when power drops below {W}" I have "4", which should signal the app that washer is finished, but it doesn't. At my present setting (see below) the App doesn't trigger the wash is finished UNTIL I raise the washer lid which turns off the finished LED green light.The washer could be finished for awhile , but until the lid is raised , I get no notification. Any suggestions on settings would greatly be appreciated
I know you will surely get tired of my asking this .. but have you looked at the events for the power switch. If not, that would be much more reliable than watching the device page. You'll see a history at the time the washer completed and what is was reporting, like this:
