Our housing community has a common laundry room and we are looking to understand how much power is consumed by the different dryers (2 drying cabinets and one tumble dryer). The tumble dryer is a bit variable in use, but the drying cabinets are basically consuming a fixed amount of power if they are on.
While we have a power meter on the entire room, it does not give us enough granularity at the device level - we are looking to replace one or two of the dryers with heat pump based models, so we would like to measure the usage of each device to determine how much people are using each type of dryer.
The easy way would be to put power monitors on each unit, but this would be a few hundred euros (these are hard wired units and since it is the community, we would need an electrician to get involved).
My idea is the use Aqara vibration sensors to determine when they are on. While I can see on/off type data quite easily, I would like to somehow integrate these directly into Home Assistant’s Energy settings - so if vibration is sensed then HA registers 14000w of power while the sensor is detecting vibration.
Any ideas on how to do this?
