I see a lot of posts discussing energy monitoring, both sensing and logging.
I'm curious what folks have for goals with this information. I know energy = $$ but real time data would not help me conserve.
I have a P3 Watt / Watt-hr device that I can plug a device in and monitor it for a week or month. That pretty much is all I need so I'm curious what others are gaining from measuring real time energy.
John
I use power monitoring to keep track of the power state for a few devices that i can control with hubitat but don’t get confirmation they turned on or off.
Window a/c’s are a great example of this. I can send IR commands to a window a/c using the Remotec ZXT-120, which acts like a z-wave thermostat to hubitat. But I don’t know for sure the a/c turned on or off unless I check power it’s currently using. I have some rules setup to let me know if the wattage didn’t pass above or below a set threshold when it should have.
I don't have any "whole-home" energy monitoring set up, but I imagine people use it to track peak usage times or pinpoint what appliances might be power-hungry by seeing how usage changes when they're off vs. on. (I lied--my utility company did provide me with a Zigbee device I can put over my outside meter that communicates with a Bridge inside my house and is supposed to provide me real-time data like this. In reality, it fails to connect about 90% of the time. I haven't chekced to see if it's straight-up ZHA and might be usable on Hubitat.)
I do have several energy-monitoring outlets. I originally tried to use a Zooz power strip for something like "when comptuer power usage drops below X watts, turn off monitor/speakers/etc.", simulating the old "smart power strips" of the past with "master outlets" that turned of "child outlets" when power usage went under a threshold to eliminate vampire draw. Turns out, this is pretty unreliable with a laptop that is so low-power when sleeping vs. on but not doing much that it was hard to tell the difference, at least not with making the power reporting threshold so low that it flooded my Z-Wave logs with reports (even worse on a power strip: one per outlet!), something I thought it was wise to avoid. Instead, I have a virtual switch that turns this all off then I leave my house (automatic via presence) or go to bed. Good enough for me. 
Another outlet I have on my washing machine. This is one of two reliable ways I could think of to get notifications when it's done. My machine's usage spikes higher than any other point in the cylce during the final spin, so watching for that and then waiting a few minutes works for me. The alternative here would be a HomeSeer "indicator light" sensor, as my washing machine also has a "Done" LED that would be 100% reliable (but so is this so far). I do have one of those for my dryer, which is 220 V so not usable with a smart outlet and not something I wanted to wire an energy-monitoring device into.
The only other place I actually use one is on my dehumidifer. I don't care a lot about its power consumption per se (at least not for this purpose), but I am curious how often its running. I have this data fed into Home Assitant and a chart that shows on vs. off time based on wattage, which I monitor on occaasion to see if I see anything odd (like it almost never turning off).
Other than that, I honestly wish more of these outlets didn't have energy monitoring. Z-Wave is pretty low-bandwidth (though the amount of data is also pretty small) and I don't like the idea of a bunch of these flooding my network with reports I'm not going to use 99% of and making my hub do the work of constantly creating events for things I don't care about. Whenever possible, I configure devices to not report at all or set the thresholds/intervals as high as it lets me (some still seem to do this with "Disabled," and even with high thresholds, I've found some still send reports on 0 vs. anything else, like 0 W vs. 0.2 W when my washing machine LED is flashing--more motivation to take the laundry out quicker!).
I use it for as another way to turn the outlet off. I have two Raspberry Pi's that act as media PCs for two of the TVs in my house. An RPi doesn't really power off, it just halts. The only way to wake it up really is to pull the power and plug it back in. Also, if it is left plugged in and halted, if the power blips, it starts right back up again. I also have those TVs on an IR blaster to turn them on/off remotely.
Well, when I shut down the RPi through the media center PC software, the power drops on the energy monitoring outlet and that's the queue for a rule to shut down the outlet, the TV and the stereo. So, I don't have to do it manually. Also, in the living room, that's the queue to leave "TV Lighting" mode.
But all of the outlets I have are Iriv V2, which can be configured to not be as chatty as others. For example, the one I have my soldering Iron plugged into I have set to 5 watt granularity. I usually only get 1-3 reports on this outlet while i have it on for about an hour. The power draw is pretty constant. I don't know what it would do on something like a TV or something that is a lot more variable.
John,
Real time data isn't how I've used the power reporting. I look at the power used over time to determine if a device needs to be replaced or if I need to automate shutting it off completely. A good example is the Lasko tower heater I have in the living room (my office). Even when not actively heating, it averages about $5 per month in energy. A Zooz Zen15 and a Broadlink Mini3 let me cut off the heater completely when not in use saving a little bit of money. It also provides the side benefit that I can turn the heater on/off by voice using my Amazon Echo rather than looking for the remote (which is often lost in the clutter of my desk) or getting my (lazy) derriere out of the chair.
I ended up replacing the 120V oil radiator heater in the bedroom and going with a Mica panel heater that I only activate (using a pressure sensor) when in bed. That one replacement currently saves about $15 per month. The power monitoring of the Zen15 told me what power was being used over time, but it's the switching capabilities that is actually saving the power.
One of the things I'm testing currently is trying to control temperature in the living room partially by using a Hampton Bay ceiling fan to circulate warmer air at the ceiling downward and hope to eventually control automatically. I have 3 sensors: one at floor level, another at chest height (standing), and a 3rd that will be at ceiling height after the USB extension cable arrives later today. That was driven in large part from finding out exactly what percentage of my power bill was from heating requirements.
On some appliances, I'm watching power usage to see if it might not be more cost efficient to replace them in the long term. But another usage for the power monitors on those same appliances (not yet implemented) is to make sure that are operating. Take the small chest freezer in my kitchen. If it failed (not drawing power), it'd ruin more meat than the entire value of the freezer and the Zen15 hooked to it. Conversely, I could watch the power usage and see if it's running excessively.
I have a whole house meter in place and mainly use it for estimating power bills at this point. But it's also come in handy for looking at power usage on devices where I don't (yet) have power switches installed. When the heat is off along with the water heater and other major appliances are not running, I (now) have very small electrical usage. So far I've reduced by power bill by about a third (based on the average costs from March of 2010 forward) since applying smart home devices. But to be fair, I'm sure the cost per kilowatt hour has gone up drastically over that time period. So the savings may be even be higher.
Bill
I use a smart outlet to monitor an automatic pump I have in my basement stairwell's "covered drain that is actually just a hole". I get an alert when the power hits a certain level or drops.
@mike Has a pretty cool use for this, I gather
Personally, I use energy monitoring to see what devices are being used and create events based off of that --- our treadmill, kitchen appliances (I get a notification if pizza is done being made, or if someone made popcorn --- different gadgets that use power in certain ranges that are easy to detect). That's part of making all of this fun: "Hey, enjoy the pizza!", or not letting me turn off the lights in the morning if I don't work out on the treadmill.
I have an energy meter that tracks a Philips wakeup alarm for our roommate. When her alarm goes off, the lights in her room fade up as the light on her alarm fades up.
I use energy meters to detect when laundry is being done, as well.
I've yet to set up home-energy monitoring. I intend to use it to get a good idea of when our power is being consumed, though, and create an energy plan around that.
Wow, do you use point of use energy meters to achieve all of this monitoring? I have a whole home energy monitor and would like to set something up to monitor similar to this. There was a website called Biglee that attempted to do this but they went commercial only.
Most of my meters are Iris V2 Smart Plugs. They work well enough. I suppose my Inovellis support energy monitoring, but I'm not using that. I also have an Aeon whole-home monitor ... but I don't think that's operational, right now.
For each of those devices, I'm using RM. I intend to write an app (Which device is running) after I transition to a new hub, though.
I have a sense energy monitor that I use to track this data. It's nice to see my power hogs, but I still have a number of unidentified devices that are still pulling power after about 10 months. Would love to figure out how to integrate this more into my smart home.
I also have some newer Zooz/inovelli switches that I believe monitor energy usage, but haven't seen that field yet in devices in hubitat, unless I'm missing it
Is there a energy monitor that plugs into a wall outlet -- that hubitat can monitor -- and turn something on/off based on the energy monitor's reading?
I think what you’re looking for is power sensing. Very few available that can do this. Some Z-Wave (cannot recall which ones) and some Insteon outlets can do this. It’s rare
I use a Aeon HEM v5 to monitor whole house power usage and display it in a Grafana dashboard.
I like to look at it in the morning just to see if anything is abnormal. Lots of lights left on, compressor left on in the garage, etc. You can also get a feel for how much power your home is using at rest. In bed, nobody home, etc. From 22:00 to 06:00 you can see 450-470 watts. The smaller bumps in that time period are the chest freezer cycling. The bigger bumps are the refrigerator cycling.
I also have another dashboard with daily/weekly/monthly bar graphs of power/water/gas usage so you can compare previous usage.
For geek factor I'm also recording water and gas usage. For that I have a Raspberry PI with a SDR dongle listening for the meters to report.
No data earlier than Feb. That's when I moved from ST to HE and wiped my influx database.
I use z-wave outlets that measure power to detect whether my clothes and dishwasher are running.
Also, on the coffee pot, the light over the coffee station comes on dimmed when brewing is detected.
You can purchase about 9 of these for the price of a Sense whole home meter. I've used these to monthly monitor energy usage. I also used these to determine on replacing older freezers, and refrigerators that were using 2.5x the amount of energy of new ones that are even much larger. 2 years of energy cost difference = Price of New larger freezer. Did the same on televisions.
After a year I reduced my overall monthly kilowatt usage almost 800kw per month and have newer stuff just by replacing older appliances, televisions, etc.
Thank you to everyone who replied to my post. I now have many great ideas to try! Many thanks!
Awesome! Thanks! If this works then THIS is the answer for me!
I've recently decided to purchase a few smart plugs with energy monitoring.
Although this seems like a fairly simply question, I can't seem to find a simple answer.
Essentially, I'd like to know how to use hubitat/webcore/whatever to actually show costs of running an individual appliance (on a daily/weekly basis).
Any tips?
Here's the information for the device, if this makes the question easier to answer:
TIA
I am working right at this moment on adding energy cost calculation in this driver, as per the latest EU directives 
The plan is to add in the driver energyCost and energyDuration attributes (ready to be displayed on HE dashboard), similar to Kevin's "Zooz Power Switch" z-wave driver.
interesting.
I'm also pursuing the webcore forum, as there are some very clever people over there too.
reading all with interest... =)
Download the Hubitat app
