Using QwikSwitch to monitor device cycles/usage

Development
1

Hi All

One of the QwikSwitch (Hub) devices also monitors power consumption. My idea is to try and use this device to determine devices cycles so I can for example receive a notification once the washing machine is done with a wash.

The way the device works is that it keeps a few counters that can be used to workout the load. The device thus needs to be polled to work out the load between the two polling events. I’m hoping that there will be enough of a difference between the load of the machine simply being switched on and actually washing. Specifically those idle times where it is in “waiting” mode during a wash cycle.

Anyway, back to my question… Is this something that should be done in HA using Automation or should this be a script running on the QwikSwitch Server which simply publishes when the washing machine is switched on, starts washing and then publishes the electricity usage once the washing cycle has finished.

Also does HA cater for this type of information, i.e. washing machines/firdges/geysers and associated (power) usage? I’m assuming that normal on/off/duration activity is already being tracked/logged.

The plan is to use it on my Dishwasher and Fridges too to try and plot the data (activity and power usage) over time.

Thanks for the help.

Regards
Paul

1 Like
2

This is an interesting idea. I have a z wave switch with power monitoring that I might be able to do the same thing with. And for the same reason - laundry. I haven’t installed it yet, but this gives me a reason to check it out.

3

Love the idea of receiving an email when the washing machine is done! Did you manage to create something like this?

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Hi Paul,

The best way to do this would be to add a attribute of power to the qwikswitch Entity

Currently we can only do automations on entity states, so that means you will have to extract the attribute with a template sensor and on the template sensor you can then do a automation, if from high to low, for say 10 min your washing machine is done

If can you mail me the values from the qsusb hub, I can look at it again (did add the power conversion function to the library if I’m not mistaken). You can also do a PR against the QSUSB repo (in the same way as the HASS repo and we can work on it together

Will add some more customizations when I convert qwikswitch to async (soon :smile:)

5

I managed to automate pushbullet based on the power consumption of my washing machine. I send the power consumption value of the washing machine to a statistics sensor and then do the notification with:

  • alias: ‘Wasmachine notify’
    trigger:
    platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.statistics_op_wasmachine_value_mean
    below: 2
    action:
    • service: notify.pushbullet
      data:
      title: “'Wasmachine”
      message: “De wasmachine is klaar”

Without the statistics sensor in between the system would go nuts and trigger the automation rule multiple times per second.

6

@PollieKrismis I recently added sensors (& binary_sensors in 0.68),- this should be able to read and decode the values from the QwikCord, but since I dont have one it would be great if you can test this and provide some feedback

These days we have statistics sensors (to be explored), but as a basic functionality you could add a hidden input_* field and save the counter in here?