I’m looking for a Smart plug that reports usage/load to HA preferably in under 10 second intervals.
I would like to be ablet o use a load increase as a trigger for automation. Being able to detect if device A turns on and if it does then turn on device B. If Device A goes off then Turn off device B
Obviously device A would be a device that is not controlled directly by HA
Preferably Matter. But zwave or Zigbee will work too as I have radios for both on my system. Not interested in anything that is internet dependant
I use six Innr SP 244 and just got four Nous A9Z - the Innr photo on the link seems to show the Europeam model, but I think the SP 244s are US-exclusive.
They are all Zigbee devices and I integrate them via Z2M.
In the Z2M configuration I have set up one of the plugs to report current changes every second - which it kind of does, but more like every 3-5 seconds which is fine for my purposes:
I don’t know, if the Innr plugs do that too; never needed it so far except for this one case where I check if a Bose Speaker is on before I send an IR On/Off Toggle command to it.
Also, I use current instead of power because it generally seems to report quicker. Not sure why that is, though.
My innr died on me after 4-5y and I think innr stopped making plugs with power metering after SP 200? not 100% on that? The aqara ones still work but there’s a bug when reporting power usage to deconz there’s a factor 10 difference.
I tried looking for other zigbee plugs that are compatible with deconz, but I stopped looking and moved to wifi esphome ones from athom.tech They work great. I also got their mmwave motion sensor and ir-bridge that I’m happy with. Can recommend.
I use these and love them, they definitely report energy usage:
I use for automations in NodeRED when over or uder certain (amp) usage levels to detect things like TV on vs. just in standby.
Sonoff S31 flashed with ESPHome works great for that. I have some automations based on power that I’ve used them for. Eg. Monitoring the power/sleep state of a PC while booting and shutting down.
Just got some of the Thirdreality Zigbee plugs. They’re working great, but I haven’t used the power monitoring functionality.
My understanding is that both zwave and Zigbee networks can suffer with energy monitoring as they are low bandwidth protocols and energy monitoring can clog up the network leading to problems.
I’d lean towards WiFi based like the S31 for something that needed such frequent updates.
I’ve been using Aqara and Zooz plugs with Zigbee on my HA setup, and they usually report power usage pretty quickly, well under 10 seconds most of the time. They work locally, so there’s no internet dependency, which is great for reliable automations. I’ve set up triggers based on load changes before, and it’s worked smoothly to turn other devices on or off depending on whether the main device is running. Matter is still pretty new and hasn’t quite caught up yet for this kind of thing, so sticking with Zigbee or Z-Wave is probably your best bet right now.
I do like the sound of that. I would have to agree I have been debating putting all of that on its own hidden IoT ssid and vlan but just haven’t had taken he time for the hassle of repairing everything
Seperate vlan is a good practice, but it’s tricky getting home assistant to play nice on two vlans. I had to give it two virtual NICs in Proxmox and tinker a bit.
I’d be much less concerned about an ESPHOME device on my main VLAN than anything off the shelf which I basically don’t allow.
Most devices on there are plain blocked from the internet and HA is their only connection. Had to set up a NTP server on there, and some devices (Kasa) will literally malfunction if you block them, they’re programmed to do so.
If you’re into privacy, my understanding is hidden SSID is a no go as your phone will go around asking if that network is available which is an identifier. I switched my to a visible network, and actually the new devices connect to the main SSID but they get a different password which tells the AP that it’s connecting to a different VLAN. That’s a newer unifi feature.
