Hey guys, I've been looking for a Hubitat compatible smart socket to use with my pellet smoker. Here's what I want to be able to do..... Turn it on and off via Google Voice and have a script monitor electricity usage and turn it off automatically if below a certain usage threshold for a specific amount of time.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with pellet grills, they are interesting beasts. The grill has a controller that manages the temperature by controlling a fan (to speed combustion) and a pellet auger that delivers fuel. They also have a heating element that is only used at startup to ignite the pellets. So, the fan, the auger and the igniter toggle on and off independently to control the temperature. What I want is a smart switch that can monitor the electrical usage and turn the power off once the grill has fully shut down (when you hit the grill's power button, it turns the fan on to clean out the burn pot, so it needs power for 10-15 minutes after it's "turned off").
My requirements are:
Must run locally
Must have power monitoring capability
Preferably Zigbee or Z-wave - not cloud based WiFi
Reasonably priced.
With the Smartthings hub, I used the Smartthings WiFi plug. Unfortunately, it's not local and isn't supported by Hubitat (and while it had power monitoring, it was only available to the Smarthings appd and not usable for my purpose).
While this isn't a "drop in" item, it should allow for FULL programming via the maker API (or MQTT as the interface it built in). Obviously, it will require some programming on the device end to add the feature set, but that can be done by uiFlow (their graphical programming language), PYTHON or Arduino interface.
I have one on order (supposedly 15-30 day shipping). I'll follow up when I get the device.
There are plenty of Hubitat-compatible zigbee/z-wave plugs that support power reporting. I use one to turn off the charger to my MacBook Air 20 minutes after it drops below a certain threshold.
What are the power requirements of your pellet smoker?
No reason this shouldn't work. Just be aware that there are options that require less work.
" Power monitoring chips such as HLW8032 (Blitzwolf SHP5) and CSE7766 (Sonoff S31, Sonoff POW R2) occasionally report invalid power measurements for load values below 5W. During this situation it sometimes reports a valid load. By setting SetOption39 to 128 (default) it must read at least 128 invalid power readings before reporting there is no load.
To discard all loads below 6W simply set SetOption39 1 (0 will reset to default on next restart) so it will report no load below 6W."
@aaiyar, This is a great idea! My laptop battery is toast and was reading that laptop batteries are happiest between 20%-80% charge and that heat and charging at the same time is really tough on them. Mind sharing your energy monitoring rule for this?
Second this. Any time you are talking about appliances, fans, or other motors, you should be looking at something a bit more heavy duty. The Zen15 is rated exactly for these type things.
Downside is that it isn't outdoor rated, but if it was inside a grill base/cabinet and out of the weather, it probably would be OK.
