We have a couple of Maglite ML150LR flashlights around the farm. They come with a nice wall-mounted charging cradle that - according to the manual - should be suitable for long-term storage of the flashlight. This is not true!
You will ruin the battery and we have had to replace 4 of these expensive batteries in all of our flashlights, they last 13 months and are our of warranty with 5 seconds of power.
A year ago we put the wall-wart in a simple analogue timer providing power only one hour per day and the batteries are still working fine. Moving in to winter-season we use them more often and the charging cycle needed some additional flexibility.
Queue Home Assistant and Shelly Smart Plugs!
A small automation now monitors the power consumption of the charging cradles and turns them off when the power usage gets below 1.5W (flashlight fully charged and sitting idle in the cradle) or after 45 minutes (to protect agains any error). The trigger allows us to tap the button on the Shelly plug to start the automation. Also planning to initiate the charging cycle once per week.
/Mattias
alias: Laddning Maglite
description: ''
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: switch.maglite
from: 'off'
to: 'on'
condition: []
action:
- wait_for_trigger:
- platform: numeric_state
entity_id: sensor.maglite_power
below: '1.5'
for:
hours: 0
minutes: 0
seconds: 10
milliseconds: 0
timeout: '2700'
- service: homeassistant.turn_off
target:
entity_id: switch.maglite
mode: single
