I am a newbie to home automation and can’t follow a lot of the market’s jargon. I am hoping you can tell me exactly what to buy and how to set up the “system” to achieve the following.
We want to buy a smart electrical outlet (we actually want to buy like 100 smart outlets) for our hotel. We want to plug an Electric Fireplace into the smart electrical outlet. (We prefer outlets to plugs so guests can’t remove the plug and override the below).
Now, let’s say a guest checks into the room with the electric fireplace. We want the guest to be able to hit the “on” button on the electric fireplace (or via the remote to the electric fireplace) that is plugged into the smart electrical outlet ANYTIME they want. ANYTIME.
When the guest hits the “on” button on the electric fireplace, we want the smart electrical outlet to “sense” that the electric fireplace is now drawing power (because the electric fireplace has been turned on by the guest), and we want the smart electrical outlet to — 60 minutes later — cut off power to the electric fireplace. Then, we want the smart electrical outlet to immediately restore power to the electric fireplace. If, say, two minutes later, the guest hits the “on” button again on the electric fireplace, and turns it on, we want the smart electrical outlet to AGAIN sense the power draw, and cut power in 60 minutes. The guest should be able to use the electric fireplace 3 times, 5 time, 100 times…it doesn’t matter. But EVERY time the guest turns on the electric fireplace we want it to AUTOMATICALLY shut off in 60 minutes. WE DO NOT WANT THE GUEST TO BE ABLE TO OVERRIDE THIS FUNCTION. WE WANT TO FORCE THIS 60-MINUTE TIME LIMIT ON THE GUEST AUTOMATICALLY. WE WANT TO ALLOW THE GUEST TO USE THE ELECTRIC FIREPLACES AS MANY TIMES AS THEY WANT…BUT ONLY IN 60-MINUTE INCREMENTS.
Any suggestions on how to achieve this? I have tried A LOT of smart outlets and none did what I wanted.
A lot to unpack. So much more to think about beyond the device model. Without knowing any of your specifics or making any specific recommendations for devices, I can give some generic advice.
Ideally you’ll want to be managing everything in a home automation platform. Presumably you already use Home Assistant?
With such a large number of devices you have planned, you’ll need to consider the network infrastructure to support them. If wifi devices, you’ll need a network scalable enough to support that. If ZigBee, the number of devices could be a problem. There are other choices like zwave & matter/thread.
You certainly don’t want to rely on a cloud service, so choose a local network option for the devices.
What other features do you want. Energy management?
There are commercial electrical controls that do this - in the states it’s called an in-wall countdown timer.
But you left out an important part. Geography. Voltage and amperage and wiring specs vary wildly by geo we MUST know at least your country for good recommendations.
That said.
If it’s that important to you then this should be a feature built into the ‘lighting’ (in this case the light is an electric fireplace) controller itself and not relegated to a server like HA.
Because if you implement it off the controll itself then there are numerous situations where the cutoff timer could not fire - you don’t really want to setup long wait states in HA automations.
Long waits can get in the way of the automation success. This (60 min) qualifies as a long wait.
Instead if thee timer is implemented at the control everything se can go off the rails and the controller WILL turn off the light and it will be ready to turn on again. At 100 units I wouldn’t want to build it myself so esp32 is likely not what you want. I’d do dumb timed lighting controller. ( correct, I would not do it with HA in a hotel setting.)
Tl;DR. Let us know what country to recommend in-wall countdown timers for…
