On my continued quest to optimize rules in my hub, I keep running into rules that are triggered on power level changes or becomes. For the devices being monitored, each variation in the power level will trigger rule execution. For example, when my washer is running merrily along, the voltage variances trigger the monitoring rule very frequently, as does my dryer rule. There is an increase in response times of the hub while the washer/dryer are being used. Part of me wants to just pull the monitoring out of RM and just create a custom app to perform the task. The other part would love to see another capability, say contact, for the devices in question. This capability would be true/open if power level over a user-defined level, false/closed otherwise. I'd then be able to utilize those binary indicators to trigger the appropriate rules.
Thoughts? Am I just missing a better way? The laundry is just one example in my setup, I have others as well that are being utilized for some other tasks.
You could certainly write a custom app that does something like what you're asking for (or just write/use one directly to monitor the power for laundry purposes--a few exist in the community already). Most apps are probably smaller than Rule Machine and, if well written, probably faster to execute for the same reason. However, it's the device itself that is sending the messages to the hub, so if those are excessively frequent, it will eat up Z-Wave or Zigbee bandwidth (both pretty slow, though the data is also pretty small) and could be the reason for the "slowdowns" you notice.
In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to set the parameters on the device, if available, to only report power when some threshold is met. For laundry purposes, I'm able to put this pretty high on my washing machine. Same with my dehumidifier. I don't need to know about every 10% change of every 5W or whatever, so I went with the largest I could do and still get the data I needed. This cuts down in (in my case) actual Z-Wave traffic. I also happen to have things like this running on a separate hub, a Z-Wave/LAN hub I have dedicated to Z-Wave devices, custom code, and whatnot in order to keep things I really care about being fast (my lighting automations, almost all Zigbee) fast, so I have a dedicated hub for those. That might be too much for most people, but it was important enough to me. If your device has any configuration in this regard, that would be my first recommendation.
If your device has any configuration in this regard, that would be my first recommendation.
