[RELEASE] Powerley Thermostat and Energy Bridge Driver

Powerley Thermostat and Energy Bridge Driver

Powerley makes energy monitoring and control services & solutions for utility companies.

They market a ZWave & Zigbee hub they call an Energy Bridge, they also market a ZWave thermostat and an app (available for both Android and Apple) to control said devices.

Thermostat driver can be imported from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcastellucci/hubitat/main/powerley/drivers/Powerley-Thermostat.groovy

Energy Bridge driver can be imported from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcastellucci/hubitat/main/powerley/drivers/Powerley-Energy-Monitor.groovy

*Both drivers are also available in a 'Hubitat Powerley' package in the Hubitat Package Manager under tags, 'Climate Control', 'Energy Monitoring' and 'ZWave'.

  • The thermostat can be controlled by Hubitat using the generic ZWave thermostat driver but there is no way to change any of its settings, not even manually at the thermostat itself, so the thermostat driver in this package allows the device to be properly configured from the Hubitat device page (settings such as HVAC equipment configuration, swing setting, tempurature offset, display brightness, etc.).

  • The energy monitor driver emulates a device with both "Power Monitoring" and "Energy Monitoring" capabilities using the MQTT broker on the local LAN hosted by the Energy Bridge, specifically its 'event/metering/instantaneous_demand' and 'event/metering/summation/minute' endpoints, respectively.

  • Note - the Powerley Energy Bridge needs to be on the same local LAN as the Hubitat and it needs to be served a static IP from your router (easiest way is to tie it to its MAC address), then there's a configuration setting on the device page to enter that IP.

  • Both of the MQTT broker endpoints offer POWER usage information, not energy, per-se. The instantaneous_demand endpoint is updated every three seconds with the current WATTS being used, the summation/minute endpoint is an average of those three-second reports over one minute, which some may loosely consider a measure of 'energy' although usually energy is kWh, which this is NOT. Nonetheless the summation/minute reporting is exposed as the 'energy' attribute for the 'EnergyMeter' capability and the instantaneous_demand reporting is exposed as the 'power' attribute for the 'PowerMeter' capability.

  • As mentioned in the threads noted below, sometimes the instantaneous_demand stops reporting. There is a topic that the Powerley app publishes to when it is opened on a user's device, is_app_open, and that 'kicks' the process and gets it reporting again. I have personally not needed to do this as mine seems to continually report no matter what, but others have experienced it stop after about 5 minutes & need to publish to that topic to get it reporting again. Just to cover all bases this driver will do that when the 'powerStart' command is ran. If this needs done periodically then a Rules Machine rule could be set up to monitor the 'powerState' attribute and, if it goes to 'stopped' then run the 'powerStart' command to start it back up.

The need for these drivers came about recently, specifically for AEP Ohio customers, as AEP Ohio lost regulatory approval to offer Powerley's services to their customers after November 30, 2020 and as such the app will cease to function after that date, along with any remote control ability, thermostat scheduling functions and energy reporting.

Not wanting to buy new Z-Wave thermostats and also not wanting to buy a separate energy monitor when there's already a perfectly working smart meter on the side of the house, I wrote these drivers after a lot of research into existing community thermostat drivers & MQTT drivers, forum threads here and here and on the documentation for the Powerley thermostat itself.

Many, many thanks to all those who I've linked to above - without their hard work I would not have been able to write these drivers and continue using these devices!.

Drivers come with NO WARRANTY whatsoever and are Apache 2.0 licensed.

Do with as you please & enjoy!!

3 Likes

Thanks so much for creating this. This driver works very well for me so far. Can you share the documentation for the Powerley thermostat itself? The link you have above seems to be broken for me. I only have heating and no cooling. I'd like to see if there is a way to disable the "cooling selection" when going between heating and off.

Glad you are finding it useful. This thermostat is pretty bottom of the barrel, feature-wise, it doesn't offer heat-only or cool-only that I can see (like a lot of others do). Regarding the broken link, I found it on zwave alliance where they have links for both the product manual as well as zwave command class specifications, etc., maybe you can find something useful there. Good Luck!

Thanks very much Ben. The link to Zwave alliance was just what I was looking for. As you indicated, there does not seem to be any way to configure it to be "heat only". Thanks!

I've been using the Energy Monitor for over a year and it worked very well. Unfortunately I recently noticed that Hubitat cannot connect to the static IP address of my Powerley Energy Bridge. I know it's working since my utility shows current power via their app (and my router shows activity). Is it possible Powerley shut down access to it's MQTT port?

I doubt they turned off the mqtt port, that's how the mobile app communicates with the energy bridge when it's on the same network. I find it more likely they just added a password, maybe changed the topic, some other thing that needs to be reverse-engineered again.

Mine unfortunately stopped working altogether recently. I can connect to the mqtt broker on it just like before and subscribe to topics, publish, etc. but there's no longer any data being published to the topics. I have a feeling the power company came along & did some housekeeping and must have sent an unbind command to the meter to disassociate it from the bridge.

I tried emailing the guy at Powerley who always answered my questions when AEP was participating but I never heard back from him.

I have unfortunately written the energy bridge off, I'll need to break down & buy a monitor I guess.

Good luck with yours!

Edit: I just re-read what you wrote, sorry, I guess I thought you were wondering if they shut down the port entirely, now I see we're actually on the same page RE access to the port, etc.

I cannot recommend the iotawatt enough

Thank you for the information about how it communicates when on the same network. Since mine is still registered with DTE and functional on their app, I'll dig deeper and try a few tricks.

Thanks again!

Actually, apparently all I had to do was post here & it decided to start working again :slight_smile:

What I really think happened was the smart meter itself just needed a 'reboot'. We had about a one second brown-out and right after that I immediately began receiving power usage updates from the energy bridge again.

I'm glad it's working again but now I'm worried if this happens in the future I don't really have a way to 'reboot' the meter myself, at least any kind of easy way...

Anyway, good luck!

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