The purpose of having a small value is to do things in real-time.
Thereās another piece of automation Iām working on that connects to this one. It will more or less tell you stats like these:
This feature does require precision because youāll eventually want to know if your appliance has finished its cycle, and the detection has to be close to reality.
Having a value of less than 1 min is already a big accomplishment because it doesnāt affect precision in a meaningful way. Setting it to 20 is more than reasonable.
I want to say THANK YOU! I had tried several different ways to monitor the washing machine. All had issues, like false positives, or not being reliable.
Merry Christmas, @leofabri! Just ran the wash (yep, a bit late today, itās been that kind of day!) and with the adjustment to 20, it prematurely went off 7 times (one of which was VERY early in, perhaps the first 5 minutes!), so I think I need to move it higher still.
Conveniently enough, today also happens to be the day (monthly - it doesnāt usually fall on a Saturday) that I use the āwashing machine cleanerā so Iām going to up the number to 30, and see what this second run reveals.
I think 45 may be an acceptable solution. I had 2 false positves (one at 28 minutes, one at 1 hour, 12 minutes). I could probably try tuning it more/higher but I think when Iāve got friends in town, taking care of me after surgery, letting them know to ignore the first 2 alerts is easy enough.
Thanks again - do you have a coffee/ko-fi link somewhere?
Edited on 1/7/2023 because I canāt make another post because Iāve made the last 3:
What will probably be my last update (unless you should happen to update the code again!) ā¦ I did end up modifying the delayed job completion duration from 45 seconds to 60 seconds. This time I only had 1 false positive, again at the 1 hour, 12 minute mark. It may be worth noting that it finishes within 10 minutes of that, so Iām not sure what that finally little power push is, but itās enough to make the automation a bit cranky!
Either way, I am very grateful for you, your patience, and your time with this blueprint. I hope you had a fantastic holiday season!
Thanks so much for this automation blueprint!! Do you know of a good lovelace card that I could use on my dashboard using this in some way? Iām not an expert at HAS yet and still learning.
Hey @chicknlil25, sorry for the delay man. My sincerest hope is that youāre recovering well after your surgery and that youāre blessed with good health.
The month following the holidays was pretty hectic for me, with a lot of work and unexpected problems cropping up. But, the holidays themselves were enjoyable and I hope you had a good one too!
I understand that youāve been experiencing some false positives with the automation, which can be a tricky thing to get right. If youāre still encountering them, increasing the threshold to over 60 seconds might help the system detect when the appliance has finished its job more accurately, but it might slow down the detection of the end of the job by X seconds. If that delay isnāt a concern for you, you can adjust the settings and experiment to your liking.
Please donāt hesitate to reach out if you need any help, Iām always available to assist. I know itās been a while since Iāve been in the forum and I was a little scared to come back and find people angry and wanting to kill me ahah.
Havenāt had the surgery yet, but thank you nonetheless! I adjusted the threshold to 90 seconds and that seemed to eliminate that last false positive - huzzah! Now Iām trying to work out a script that will alert me on completion (via the script weād previously discussed) to send me a notification via mobile and speakers to swap the laundry over (this part is working) ā¦ but then if the contact sensor on the washer hasnāt been opened, to repeat āharrassmentā over the speakers until the load gets swapped. So far, Iāve only managed to have it skip straight to the āharassmentā and it doesnāt repeat. Iāll get it yet!
This automation is great! I just bought a new SpeedQueen TC5 washer which is about as ādumbā as an appliance can get, but it does its job well. While it was on order, I was trying to figure out how I could get some type of notification about the wash cycle completion, and your automation took all the guesswork out of it for me. Iām using a Zooz ZEN15 Power Plug with my setup. Running just one cycle with the washer, connected to the power plug, gave me enough data to set the start/finish power thresholds (start:2/finish:1). Since adjusting, Iāve run a few more cycles with no false idles or completions.
Hey @leofabri ā¦ Iāve got a script that functions properly if ran independently of your blueprint, but seemed to have stopped too early when your automation went to trigger it. This is the script:
alias: Washing Machine Notifications
sequence:
- device_id: 9ff133866a16231d6f92933f6bbbdd54
domain: mobile_app
type: notify
message: Alert!
title: The washing machine is finished. Time to flip clothes to the dryer.
- service: script.turn_on
target:
entity_id: script.google_home_resume
data:
variables:
action:
- service: tts.google_cloud_say
data:
entity_id: media_player.speakers
message: >-
<speak> <break time="2s"/>The washing machine is finished. Time
to flip clothes to the dryer.</speak>
cache: true
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 5
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
- repeat:
until:
- type: is_open
condition: device
device_id: 3dcd986900a48ca07d760d068d7f575e
entity_id: binary_sensor.washer_sensor_contact
domain: binary_sensor
sequence:
- service: script.turn_on
target:
entity_id: script.google_home_resume
data:
variables:
action:
- service: tts.google_cloud_say
data:
entity_id: media_player.speakers
message: >-
<speak> <break time="2s"/> The clothes are still sitting
in the washing machine. Flip them over to the dryer or
I'll keep annoying you!</speak>
cache: true
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 5
seconds: 0
milliseconds: 0
mode: single
icon: mdi:washing-machine
Should I be using a timer helper instead of the delay? Could that be my issue?
Hi,
you are right, that timer was never starting! Thank you for spotting this bug. Iāve just committed a couple of fixes that should help to solve the problem.
This happened because there was a recent change that wasnāt meant to be committed immediately but I did by mistake. See the last commit if you want to know what is different.
Now, Iām asking you to copy the new code and paste/replace your appliance-status-monitor.yaml in your VSCode (location: /config/blueprints/automation/leofabri/appliance-status-monitor.yaml).
