hi All,
I am planning to put a pool pump on a ZWAVE switch/contactor and I have concerns with reliability in critical applications.
I.e. If the HA sends the On/OFF command, but the switch does not ‘hear it’ so it continues its business?
This can be problematic if the automation is planned to protect against freeze etc.
I am thinking I can create a script which once it triggers the switch then it waits for a little bit and checks for example if switch reacted as expected, if Not - repeat the command.
Or it can check if the current draw is not as expected.
If you want to use zwave devices you may consider having 2 individual devices, one the switch and the other a power meter. Having them separate would reduce the chances that both devices fail at the same time. The power meter would serve to confirm that the pump has stopped as power draw will go down to zero. In other words, once you switch off the pump your code would check to see that power draw is zero. The reason I suggest this is that if the communication between HA and the switch is bad, checking it repeatedly after turning it off may actually not do anything to help.
An alternative, would be to add local intelligence using an ESP32 so that HA could be down but the pump will still be shut off if temperature is freezing. While you could rely on HA to provide the temperature, you would still be vulnerable to some failure on that end… if the ESP32 is hooked up to a basic DS18B20 (for example) temperature sensor, you can disable the pump even if HA is down. When not down, the ESP32 can allow HA full control.