I’m rather new to home automation and to Home Assistant in particular. I’m doing my best to get things working by reading everything I can find, but I couldn’t find an answer to this problem I’m having.
What I would like to achieve
I have a video projector in my living room, and i would like my smart plug to detect when it is on just by monitoring it’s current voltage or the amount of W it consumes. When my defined threshold is hit, I have an automation that is designed to close my shutters during the daytime.
Quite easy you’ll say! And you know what: the automation in itself works!
So what is the problem?
My smart plug is a zigbee one, working with Tuya. The power consumption is correctly reported and updated in Tuya in real time. I have the Tuya v2 integration in Home Assistant, and I enabled the power and voltage sensors for my smart plug. BUT these sensors are not updated automatically when I turn my projector on and off. In fact, they can keep showing the wrong value for hours.
The only way I found to get the values updated in Home Assistant is either:
By opening the Tuya app and go to my smart plug page,
Or by restaring the Tuya integration.Actually I thought it was working, but it does not fix the sensor values, my mistake!
Not an elegant solution for home automation !
What is my best solution to get this values updated, either on a regular basis (e.g. every xx seconds) or in real time?
Thanks for your help and sorry if this question looks kinda “newbish”, I can assure you I did a lot of research before posting here.
I have the same problem, 2 wifi Tuya sockets. Power/current/voltage updating only when I open Tuya app on smartphone. I installed also local Tuya integration and it works exactly the same!.
Like it wasn’t local at all.
I haven’t tried Tuya Local. But I can add my name into the hat of people that are experiencing the situation where the energy monitoring related values only update in HA (v 2022.6.7) with you have the Tuya App open on your phone.
I’m using the Antela branded WiFi Smart Plug, model number: F1s302-UK
Anyone found any workaround/solution on this? It is nice the zigbee plug but are twice expensive most of the times and the times are not ideal if you want to buy a lot…
I have now both integrations, official Tuya and local Tuya. In Local Tuya you can set scan interval and when you set it to for example 60s it refreshes also the official Tuya sensors. But Local Tuya doesn’t have all the sensors from official so I use both.
I don’t have HA but I have the same problem when using the zigbee smart plugs. I only use the Tuya app and thus platform.
I solved this problem with a simple trick.
When creating the automation add a check that is updates frequently and is always “true”.
Use “when all conditions are fulfilled”.
When smartplug “X” is above 20watt AND temperature is above -40 degrees celcius AND wind speed is below 250km/u.
The temperature check and wind check have a small delay of a few minutes…that’s the down side.
But maybe u can use another smart switch that is checked and meets the condition.
i’ve the same problem with tuya zigbee devices that not reports the power usage at all, only when i enter the device itself via tuya app.
i can’t use the automation for the if statment.
this is realy lame…
is there a way to force the device to report his power usage frequently without the need to enter the tuya app?
Hi. im having the same problem… the sensor values updates too slow, the only way to correct this is opnening the tuya app in my cellphone. Just to try a “bruteforce” approach, can you tell me how to “manually” set the scan_interval?? the configuration window used to add devices does not show a field to set that.
I can´t believe there is no solution for this? Is there any “work-around” at least how to force update the current power on the sensor?
But I have maybe found something interesting.
I have 3 sockets.
Raspberry Pi 5 : 4-16Watts
Desktop: 33W - 100W++ …
Playstation 5: 60W - 90W ++
I have added all of these 3 power sockets via local tuya, set refresh interval to 10s, and it seems it don’t work.
But …
I have found, that devices with higher current constumption seems to be updated more often. For example, if the PC has 33W at idle , and is idle for 10 minutes, it won’t refresh for 10 minutes. But if between these 10 minutes will do PC some peak, above 43W, it is registred as trigger to refresh the power consumption. It seems like sensor must be triggered by some logic…
Is it true that there is no fix for this problem? I have 2 tuya wifi plugs and the power value is randomly freezing, only fix i found for now is to open Smart Life app and then it works some time.
Same boat…if I open the Tuya phone app, navigate to the switch and put it on the ‘Electric’ tab only then do I get constant updates (if phone screen sleeps, the updates stop). And this method will only update that particular switch. No other switches update. I have to go to the other switch and select the ‘Electric’ tab to get those updates. Which basically means it is impossible (without multiple phones) to get Home Assistant to keep all values updated simultaneously (assuming you have multiple smart switches that is). Obviously the phone app knows how to force a query and keep the values pushed onto the app (and therefore cause Home Assistant to pick up the change), so why can’t Home Assistant’s Tuya integration duplicate this behavior? My guess is that Tuya doesn’t want a bunch of added traffic so this greatly reduces that (which makes me wonder about their human presence devices then??). My only side thought to that though would be…why wouldn’t “Local Tuya” fix that then? I haven’t checked this myself (I plan to), just basing it off other posts here (seems one said it worked and someone else said it didn’t).
Somewhere I read that xtend_tuya custom component helped with this problem. That would be a no (seems it only helps with making the energy kwh a retrievable value which could be useful for some, but not for this problem). I also tried creating an automation to force it to update (like someone else posted) and that didn’t work either.
Seems stupid that you can buy these smart switches that monitor current and power…yet never update to Home Assistant unless you force it through the phone app. And then even still, that only allows a single one to be updated at a time. I suppose I/we should figure out who exactly makes and maintains the Home Assistant Tuya Integration and just ask them what is up??
I’ve run into the same problem. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my device (an electric water heater) which runs in short bursts of power, there’s a big difference between HA and the Tuya app (Tuya reports 42kWh, HA only 24kWh).
Here’s a screenshot from my history - the longer peak at the end is with the Tuya app open on my phone.
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