I just got two of these power strips today from Monoprice, have one of them connected to the network. The lack of refresh is really sort of annoying; while I can call the zwave.refresh_node service with the node_id: specified, it’s seems like an unsatisfactory solution.
I’m curious what others have done other than just building an automation or script to invoke that service frequently. Setting the polling interval for the entities (like the switch entities) doesn’t seem to yield a good result. Any thoughts here?
Also, on the first unit I’ve connected, it seems weird that physical outlet layout seems to be offset by 1 from the logical entities names that got created in Home Assistant. I’m not sure if this is a weirdness of the Z-Wave implementation in the device, or just a timing thing on how Home Assistant enumerated all the entities. I’m going to rename each entity_id anyway, so I can fix it there.
Still for $20, I’m not really all that disappointed. The power monitoring is sort of interesting, but I’m looking more for controllable outlets primarily. I just wish that the current state was represented reliably in Home Assistant.
By the way, if you’re faced with renaming all the entities this thing creates, I was able to use hass-cli to do this without endless clicking and typing at web UI. Some discussion here What is the preferred way to rename z-wave entities? on the approach I took.
I’ve seen the same issue with the ‘offset’ and put it down to the fact that when OZW or HomeAssistant tris to name the sensor, there is already one with the preferred name, so it simply appends a _1, _2, _3, etc.
I’ve seen the same behavior with my ChromeCast groups. Now & then HomeAssistant ‘re-discovers’ the group called AllHome and as long as the previous one named AllHome is still there, it names the new one AllHome_1, etc. which is horribly annoying because my automations depend on the real name AllHome and they don’t work any more because it’s not the active one.
My greenwave strip is the only non Z-wave plus device in the network, would it be a good idea to move my hub to another area to the house to try and have the strip in a less dominant position in the chain?
Obviously, the device itself doesn’t do MQTT. To literally solve the question you posed, you’d need to do some sort of a bridge somewhere, probably in Home Assistant if you’re asking in this context. You could write a couple automations that triggers on an MQTT topic per switch; one that matched an, e.g., “ON” payload and then turned on the zwave switch entity. And the another that matches an “OFF” payload and then turned off that entity.
I do something like this to manipulate an input_boolean in response to some MQTT payloads, you’d just need to change the action in the automations:
…except in my case, I don’t care what the payload is since there are two different topics. You could also include a match in the trigger: to look for specific payloads.
Hi all I have about 5 X 6 port boards and 3 X 1 port power plug. I got when greenwave use to support the system. Now they are acting as dumb power boards. I’m new to home assistant and I’m thinking about buying a USB zwave dongle for my setup. Was it very hard to get these to work and there there other guides you used to do it? How did you go with the room numbers and assigning them to area or other identifiable locations?
I have a couple of the 6 outlet power strips, and I understand why they are so cheap! They have a moderately shitty Z-Wave implementation… they don’t really effectively report their status. So if you use the button on the power strip to change the state of the outlets, you won’t notice. Likewise, the power measurement seems like it’s really nifty, but that state doesn’t get updated, either. You have to do some sort of refresh operation to get those values.
In my application, I don’t really care about the power measurement, just remotely switching the individual outlets on and off. If you restrict your expectations to this, it seems to work just fine. I don’t think that the selector knob really has much of an impact - that seems to be something their application uses as part of their UI. I picked one of the “rooms” and it really doesn’t matter. As I recall, there was one or two “colors” that were “special” and I just avoided those.
When you include the device, a bunch of entities show up, including switches. They seem to work OK in Home Assistant.
Hi Imamakos,
Thanks for your reply, I’ve read similar comments before about the boards and while people seem to ask questions and try and get them fixed I can never tell if they work as I’d hoped. So in short I guess unless I’m looking to go into the zwave direction for devices, I’m probably better to just keep these as dumb and save my frustration and money and maybe look at something like this.
Have you got other smart power boards that you can recommend?
I guess I’m looking at the metering function for scene activation later in my experiments.
Very early though so for a few dollars more up front I have options down the road.
I wouldn’t give up on those strips; if you just want to turn them on and off remotely with Home Assistant, they work just fine for that. It’s just that all that fancy power monitoring stuff doesn’t work so well unless you poke it constantly to poll the usage. I don’t need that, so I just ignore the power measurement bit.
I have two of these things on my workbench that I plug various things into (soldering irons, lights, test equipment, etc.) and it serves it purpose really well. I can make sure that it’s easy to turn off everything easily that I might leave running by mistake (like the soldering irons and stuff that gets got.)
How do you guys pair greenwave power strips to HA? I use HUSBZB-1 and as per the manual, blinking green light indicated that it is not paired, that’s what I get too. Any hints? TIA
I don’t recall doing anything special. I’m using an Aeotec USB Z-Wave stick. I did the “Add Node” thing from the Z-Wave panel in Home Assistant and then did the pairing process on the power strip per the manual. (I don’t recall what those steps were by now…)
Just like @lmamakos, I don’t remember doing anything special.
What I do remember is that I thought the pairing hand’t worked due to the blinking green light,
When I looked at the dev state panel - after 12 tries or so - I found out that it had paired after all.
Same happened with the other three powerstrips I bought after that - the green ring blinks without any rhyme or reason but controlling the individual switches works fine (power consumption readings don’t, but I’m not too bothered about that).
