Habitat already knows all the "light" devices. It would be pretty cool, if I could perhaps set the wattage of each bulb, and maybe key in my electricity cost. Then, based on when a Hubitat rule/automation turned off a bulb, it could generate some measure of "electricity saved by hubitat" graph ![]()
Seems like this would be pretty easy to do with a rule, plus a hub variable if you want to share cost for calculations in variable math actions among rules. But "savings" seems like it would be difficult to calculate, as the only consistent value you could calculate would be if you assume the lights never got turned off at all otherwise, probably not a realistic comparison for most cases. But the ability to create a rule (or custom app) that does, at least, this certainly is within reach.
Ideally, Hubitat should keep track of how long each bulb has been on, to help us get a power consumption estimate. That alone can be a good start. With that, I can probably just turn off my rules for a week or so to get a baseline of consumption.. and then let Hubitat automations take over to get a nice nerdy data in any savings. I recall Alexa already had something similar where you can specify watts for each bulb.
That's exactly what I meant, though: you can do that in a rule. Trigger with the bulb turning on, set a local time variable, add a wait for it to turn off, set another local time variable then, calculate the difference, multiply by your hub variable with the cost -- and then do whatever you want with that value, likely adding it to some local or hub variable with the cumulative cost for that device.
A custom app could do something similar (without needing to create local variables in a rule and use variable math actions, maybe the trickiest part of the above). But nothing at the platform level would need to be added to make this possible -- like most automations, it already is. ![]()
This is a great idea!!
While I'm sure it could be done in a RM rule, this is the type of thing that is a selling point if it can come prepackaged, and deployed by even the most inexperienced user, and the results viewed visually in a graph.
Its not a complicated idea, but it is complicated to implement. This is one of those things that seems like it is all about marketing....
Also wondering if an app like this would allow the HE to become "Energy Star Certified" like some other home automation hardware...
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