When we first built our home I went through this exercise and had it all dialed in nicely but then we purchased a hot tub, and that offset all my efforts and more. Turning off computers has a big impact
Nice. One thing I noticed from monitoring home device usage over the years with Home Assistant (and HACS Powercalc) was how little energy LED bulbs require vs output. Even though my parents homes don't have home automation, during the price hike in energy costs a couple of years ago I got them to make an inventory of their bulbs and I replaced them all with LED equivalents. I took on the upfront cost, but the long term saving for them has been huge (esp replacing halogen bulbs). My own home is pretty efficient and, like yours, it uses automations combined + zigbee buttons so nothing stays on standby, but there was still one big power leach that niggled away at my brain. My main "big" PC, which has an Nvidia GPU for both home work and play is something I use a lot for both remote working and play at night. I justified the cost as it's a tool I use a lot, so why not. On idle it consumes 250+w and when gaming it easily ramps up to 450W+. In the end the "this could be done better" won the fight in my head. We have a headless Lenovo Tiny PC that's used as a low power remote access for when we're away (and to manage some security cameras). So instead of that coming on when not_home, I hooked it up to my monitor and started instead to use it as my daily driver and now only using the big PC in the evening when gaming or for other stuff that properly makes use of the GPU. This one thing is saving us at least £250/yr I bought it years ago from eBay, but if I was to get it again today, it would've paid for itself within 4 months.
500W idle for the house is a lot of power. I currently have a idle load of the house of around 119W with 1 of the biggest power draw of 40W comes from the Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro SE with 2 Wifi 6 pro accesspoints. An other high load is the ventilation heatpump for hot water and heat at idle with a power draw of 33W. My server just consumed around 11W at idle, but I do not have a local file store on it. Hope you can figure out to draw less power.
Great video, that base load is a killer! Did a similar survey for our house, and frustrated to discover there was no one big 'thing' that I could turn off over night to save some power. I think the best candidate was the TV antenna booster, but even that was less than 10W. The feedback on the energy usage is an absolute brilliant idea, getting 'buy in' from everyone in the house is key to energy saving, keeping it simple Green - good, Red - Bad, also great. I had an old Squeezebox music player with a nice bright VFD display showing the energy generated / imported, which worked really well. However my family did struggle with the scale of the numbers, like "look wow we are generating 300 units, best put the washing on". I'd be wary of that switch, the relay may be shot and not closing properly, drawing 3KW across it in that state could cause a fire. One of my biggest concerns with getting smart switches off Amazon that are not quite as good as advertised.
Nice and some good ideas. Towel warmers are really a first world problem!!! "When I saw young ..." :) Dry yourself in the shower enclosure. The perception of heat stays for a while after you turn off the hot water. Stepping out of the shower gives you an immediate sharp temperature change! Give it a try.
When i have a shower, i open the door just wide enough to stick my hand out and grab the towel (no towel heater for me 😞). When the towel is inside, I close the door again while I use the towel. Remember, you always gotta know where your towel is 🙂.
More like this please!! I've found new parts of HA from this video. I've pulled up six months of energy logging on my house, that i didn't know about, and have a very good idea where all my power is being used. I had not been tracking the power on my Shelly controlled lights (turned that on today) and will get some smart controllers on the Sonos speakers when i get home. I may be late to the party here but why do you need to have the towel rails on a schedule at all? You need to heat the towels when you shower and for a finite amount of time after that. How long does it take to heat the towels from a standing start? Use a humidity sensor to identify that someone is using the shower to trigger the towel rail. My towel rail is at temperature well within the time i can be in the shower. You then need a helper to control how long it stays on after that. Same deal for the guest bathroom, or when you're on holidays, or choose to be stinky and go to bed untubbed. Why turn the towel rail on unless you KNOW someone is ging to need a heated towel. One thing I've learned from years of industrial experience is to measure the thing you're trying to see, and not try to predict it.
I'm only in the shower for a couple of minutes, and I find that the towel isn't warm by the time I'm done from a standing start. We also have the towels on the warmer that we dry our hands with after washing our hands, and that doesn't trigger the humidity sensor unfortunately. This is why I use the schedule. A lot of people have had success with the humidity method though - it's a great idea!
@@HomeAutomationGuydo you trigger your holiday mode manually or automatically? i think it would be a good idea to do both. manually using a button or whatever, and automatically when no-one is home for a day or 2, or whatever makes sense to you.
I use several input boolean helpers as flags. Turn on the mode, the flag turns on. The automations check for the status of the flags as a conditional. Guest Mode runs different HVAC and other things, Party mode turns up the heat and stops automatic light off routines and disables the motion sensor lights outside, Vacation Mode turns off water heaters, closes the water valve, lowers the HVAC settings, etc.
great video! My guess with the dishwasher is that a capacitor in the smart switch is degrading over time, causing increased EMI emissions that (to your point) interfere with the dishwaser electronics. To test the theory, try powering the dishwasher using an extension lead from a power outlet a few metres away, and put the smart plug on the outlet. Not a permanent solution, but might point to what the problem is.
The reason the dishwasher stopped working with the smart plug is probably the smart plugs power got real dirty and dirty power is a thing that creates unusual stuff like that. Dishwashers are hard on power with the booster heating and the way it switches. One in the same circuit as a standard refrigerator wreaks havoc on it, that happened to me when some restoration guys were stupid. I've seen "perfectly good" power supplies mess with computer motherboards in ways that make no sense. Thanks for the video you gave me a solution to a problem I have.
Does your elecrtricity meter have a P1 port? If not, have you considered asking your electricity provider if they could install a new meter that has one? Even if it has one, you might have to ask your provider to turn the port on. Mine has, so I asked them to turn the port on, connected a RJ12 cable to the port, ordered a little device that was basically an RJ12 socket on a circuit board, connected an ESP8266 to it, installed ESPHome, and from then on, all my meter readings are stored in Home Assistant. And while the device I made was a kludge that required a bit of soldering, there are several ready to use devices you can buy, that plug into the P1 port and work with Home Assistant out of the box. Also, does your "holiday mode" do any of those old tricks like having lights on for a few hours in the evening to make it look like someone's home? I guess you could set it to move your curtains a few times a day too...
Excellent video Alan. I do like the LED changing color - based on status of the Solar/Grid energy. Which we just had installed last week. Nice to have you back again!
I've used Tapo p110 WiFi smart plugs with energy monitoring to smarten up my dishwasher. I have Home Assistant switch the plug on when the night rate electricity starts at 2am. So I just have to start a wash and then tell Alexa to turn off the plug a few seconds in. Then at 2am the wash will properly start when the plug is turned back on. Very basic but very useful. I also use Home Assistant with the power monitoring of the plug to announce that the dishwasher is finished so someone can unload it. Not very useful at 4am, but it is great when doing ad-hoc washes during the day or evening.
I really like how this RGB lights changes to green when solar energy is "wasted" by exporting to grid and it's time to use it for something. I think I'll borrow it for my system in the future.
Our towel warmer is linked to the shower light and fan. It does turn on on a timer prior to shower time. But it only turns on for the extended period after a shower to dry the towels if the shower light and fan were both turned on for more than 2 minutes, and then the light is turned off. The fan is on an hour timer after this sequence and so is the towel warmer.
Some humidity sensors in the bathrooms would help with the control of the towel rails. I am thinking of adding some to my HA install to help refine the control of our MVHR system
Thanks for the suggestions. I have implemented most of them. As an aside I notice you have Heatmisser. We have an 8 zone gas powered variant. There are a couple of things I have done to optimise gas usage when we are away. First I have changed the Away temp in the zones to 7c. There is a bug in the android app, so you need to get them to do it or use a different app. Additionally I have removed all scheduling from Heatmisser and moved it in to Home assistant using a combination of a calendar with repeating events and some automations to change the target temps. It works really well and means HA can tightly control the house heating, especially when we are away. Out of interest my home base level is 4Kwh per day for electricity. This covers our internet, home assistant server and smart plugs, switches.
What I do for my lights since I live on my own is have 1 master switch function, that turns off ANY lights that are on in the rest of the house if I turn the bedroom light OFF, from my bed. This saves the headache of finding a light still ON, when I come back later [only 2 exceptions are the smart light switches that are connected to a light with build in motion sensor [toilet/hallway]] For heating I have it set so that I don't use the climate panel buttons but my own to turn on the HEAT. I use custom buttons that are connected to a automation I can disable/enable trough a childlock. it can also only run during the winter. to prevent accidentally turning it on in the dead of summer finding your house at a TOASTY 50C. and the heater running at FULL power. Still optimizing a few things more like smart blinds to prevent draft from the windows.
That helps with drying the towels, but doesn't help with the first world problem of preheated tiles for when you come out of a 3 or 4 minute long shower
Regarding your dishwasher; My best guess is that the switch mode power supply in your smart plug is radiating conducted immersions in to the AC line at some hormonic of SMPS. This is in turn affects the control circuit of your dishwasher because the VCC filter of the control card does not filter it out and creates noise in the control electronic circuit. I would try another smart plug ( different brand) That might have less or different frequency conducted immersion. Well that is just my guess
If you have smart shades, consider raising them to let more sunlight in if you are heating the house. Likewise, consider lowering them when you are cooling the house.
Mate, what a brilliant video! I've regularly been watching yours and a few other known TH-cam channels for home automation. This episode is by far the best value of all I've watched! As any enthusiast, I also love a new gadget or a new automation but most of them are for the fun! whereas this whole video was spot on for an awesome reason! Thank you for sharing all your experiences and ideas! I will definitely make a project of each one that I don't use yet, repurposing smart plugs, meters, etc. On your issue with the dishwasher, have you thought about electromagnetic interference from your smart plug into the dishwasher control board? It is not common but not impossible. to test it, just move the smart plug away from the dishwasher (i.e. use a testing extension cord so it is located a couple of meters away from your dishwasher). If that fixes, you can probably swap by another smart plug that uses other wireless protocols (e.g. ZigBee wifi). " Why would it have only started after 8 months?" possibly due to a change in the frequency/wifi channel if you currently use wifi. good luck! If you feel that this topic generates interest, you could do another chapter focused on the devices that can be used to help with energy monitoring and efficiency (other clamps, all the smart plugs with energy monitoring capability, even smart appliances, etc. ) and also sharing/publishing some of the automation templates or dashboards on that topic that you've found useful. you could even get into solar systems integrations with HA or EV chargers integrations - for example, the phone app called Charge HQ is simple and does a fantastic job of charging EVs with excess from solar via API integration between solar systems and EV chargers rather than letting it go back to the grid.
About the towel rails - if you use a water flow sensor or a leak detector to determine when someone is having a shower, maybe you could use that to automate turning on the towel rails afterwards. Then it doesn't matter what time of day you have a shower, and it allows for not turning them on if there's no need.
There's a better way than a water flow sensor. I researched quite a bit and found that by adding a humidity sensor near the shower, HA can take not the derivative of the sensor, but instead the second derivative of the humidity. That is, rate at which the rate of change in humidity is occurring. A guy on the forum created this strategy (not me) to control a bathroom fan. I use it to control a towel bar and its works really well. I have it on a timer on days that I know I'll be showering before work, and it pre-heats on those days. Monday and Friday + weekend, my system detects a shower and runs for 2 hours after that point. Works really well.
For server power usage, have a look at tuned. This should reduce power usage without affecting performance too much. You should be able to create an initial profile with powertop.
@@HomeAutomationGuy no worries! It's also useful within VM's, not just the hypervisor(s). I managed to get one of my servers down to ~10-15w idle. But my larger server unfortunately doesn't go to a lower cstate.
4:30 it's because they fail at some point. Same problem with these plugs here and in the end you could not turn them off and on again with the phone anymore.
I've had more than a couple of smart plugs that have gone a bit wonky and decided to flick the power off and on, randomly. Seems to happen on plugs that I'm using for monitoring power use, and never switched off, so the relay is always on. Not sure if it's the relay coil "burning out" from being on all the time or something else. If yours was doing that during a cycle, it would certainly affect the dishwashing. We really need a non-relay power monitoring device
I'm 100% off the grid/solar with no utilities for 50 miles or more. I use home automation to reduce the amount of electricity and match my usage with available sunshine. My various hubs and devices draw less than 75 watts total. Very minimal
My house uses around 80 watts at idle. My total power draw for a day is 2.8 kwh all in including the fridge which is around the 400w per day mark. I did a lot of work finding out what drew power at idle or standby and pulled it down via smart switching if it’s idle pull is more than the consumption of the smart switch. I do have an even lower power mode if I am away for any length of time as well.
I've never heard of a "towel rail" before. If I were automating it I'd turn it on when there's motion detected in the shower. You may have a more regimented day than I do but I haven't showered on a schedule since I quit playing organized sports.
Interesting video, I have a solar array on my farm. I’m going to watch your video on monitoring energy usage, it would be interesting to set something similar up.
Good way to store solar power is in water heater. If you insulate it well or buy a good quality one, you can store warm water for days and use the preheated water as input to the gas furnace so i doesnt have to heat up the water as much. Or if the math works out, get water heater with integrated heat pump (much cheaper than actuall heat pump for outside of the house). It cools the outside (like fridge but other way around) and heats the water inside with much better CoP. It can be an issue if you have it in small room which will get cold, but if you put it in the same room as the furnace, you can turn the waste heat of furnace into warm water. It sounds complicated, but we both love home assistant, so nothing is too complicated :) Edit: By having the small heat pump you can get much more of your small solar panel array, that you cant expand. In my country (Czechia), you can get power billing by the hour with smart power meter (from power company) and even plan when to heat the water, so it might be cheaper than using gas, but that depends on prices available to you. Here it sometimes get even in to negative price per kWh. They even tell you what the prices will be for next 24h. Anyways, love your channel. I would love some videos about user friendly no app automations and heat schedules in HA.
Check your smart plug amp rating for dishwasher . That could be reason for your problem . Either it’s not supplying enough amp or it’s broke . Since It was working and now not . I would focus on the smart plug
Thanks for the nice overview. Please let us know what kind of switches you use for Washer & Dryer. Both appliances use more than 2,500 Watts peak and so shelly Smart Plugs are not usable. Also would like to know how you switch on the Washer & Dryer, as most have Start-buttons to press. I have older Miele appliances and cannot start them just electrically. Thanks in advance for some insights.
@@chrisc_1012 No - still pressing buttons when I wan tto start the machines. Not a big deal, but when you have other things automated, people ask questions and then I look quite dumb
Great video Alan. The smart plugs how accurate are they? I have some that overestimate the voltage saying I have 245 to 250 v all the time. This will then under estimate the power usage. I have been using the Kassa Tp Link KP115 ones and they look to be closer to the real value.
Hi, great video. Would a water sensor in the shower linked to towel rail minimise power usage? I’m not sure if a towel would warm up in the time it takes to have a shower but it would accommodate showers at any time.
The only thing i have heard is to use a humidity sensor in the bathroom to turn towel rails on or off that could possibly be better than your scheduled turn off after shower. Thanks for sharing.
@HomeAutomatoinGuy You just inadvertently justified having home energy storage (batteries) when talking about net metering: or "why you should always buy battery storage if you are buying solar panels."
@@HomeAutomationGuy I think you are spot on here and definitely not alone. I really think builders are going to have to start accounting for this stuff in their designs. When I look at the integrated heat-pump plus water heaters it gets even worse.
I found that one of my smart plugs was disconnecting from WiFi every so often and clicking the relay off and on again when it reconnected. Sometimes this was long enough for device to reset. Did wonder what the clicking noise was..
I have another problem with one of my smart plugs, the one that controls the fan (or maybe the fan is the problem? I dunno). Anyway, when I turn the fan on, sometimes the fan doesn't start, and the smart plug switches off again after a few seconds. So I wrote an automation that gets triggered when the fan is turned on, waits 15 seconds and then checks if the fan switch is on. If not, it turns it on again, re-triggering itself in the process. Sometimes it takes several attempts to get that fan running.
Keep your wine fridge full (but not over full) to keep power costs down. An empty fridge loses more "cold" when you open the door compared to a full one.
Hi Alan, many thanks for a very informative piece. I appreciate (living in Leeds) how little of that Strange Orange Globe we see in the sky, which obviously affects your solar input - given that output "money back" is low , how about a battery system ? I I have no solar myself, having to live in a Wrinklies Stalag, so my observations are all from watching and listening, not using. I did take note that your wine cooler is using so much, strange but could simply be a bad buy. Washing (dish and clothes) could possibly be improved with better research, but I would wait until you actually need to change, it's all about cost at the end of the day. I find your power monitoring very much "eye opening", informative and note worthy. Thanks again.
Thanks for the note! Apart from the wine cooler I've just been using the appliances that came with the property. I will definitely be researching energy efficiency (and possible smart capabilities) if and when things need to be replaced
I use a power provider that passes on real time wholesale rates and one of my biggest power users is the pool pump which is about 1.3kw for up to 8 hours a day. I use a node red flow to use forecasts to determine when the cheapest time of day will be to run it and automatically turn it on and off during the day to achieve this. I have nearly halved the cost of running the pump
Nice! Do you have any safeguards to make sure it runs at least once a day, and not too close together in time? Sounds like a great problem to solve with automations!
Have you heard of bubble pumps? They give you high flow rates but low pressures, for a fraction of the power that a regular pump requires. If the low head is not a problem, you could save A LOT of power. One solar panel should be enough to power the air pump.
Sounds like you have a standard fixed speed pump, in which case you should buy a pool pump inverter that just inserts into the power supply to the pump and is designed to control the pump speed. The magic comes that the power usage is almost the square of the pump speed, so reducing it will give enormous savings. As an example, I have a pump that consumes 0.75 kW at full speed. Using an inverter (I have a "Clever Pool" device from Plastica) and reducing the pump speed to 1/3 of the original ("Low" speed setting) results in it consuming one seventh of the power (0.1 kW). You can still control the speed, so have it high for backwashing, but for general running it is almost certain that 1/3 of the speed is plenty. Using this (and I also control pump timing using Home Assistant) saves me an eye-watering £1500 a year, which is many times more than the cost of the inverter.
@@HomeAutomationGuy There is a small buffer to ensure that the forecasts are not wildly out, but it does tend to turn on and off during the day as the pricing changes. If it doesn't quite do the 8 hours, then it's not a big deal. It also tends to be the same portion of the day, after the morning peak and before the early evening peak so mostly contiguous. I am considering changing to work on a weekly total to catch up if a day is very cheap and it's behind because of expensive days, but this new automation has not been running long, so I want to monitor for a while.
IMHO: About dishwasher - smart plug just can't handle load and with time contacts is overheat and loose possibility to provide constant power. If it's plug contact pair - you can see it changed colour, if it is relay - just test on high load.
It makes me realise I can probably move some plugs about to turn more of my audio visual equipment off. must remember to leave the Sky Q box and network switch on though.
holy crap are towel warmer racks a common thing in the UK? I mean obviously its a luxury addon but like is it common enough that most people have seen it or could reasonably obtain it
Why not put a humidity sensor in the bathroom and turn on the towel rail when the humidity increases? So it would switch on when someone is showering or taking a bath.
It takes too long for the towel rail to warm up. By the time the humidity sensor notices that I'm in the shower, I'm already getting out and my towel is still cold 😞
@@HomeAutomationGuy hehe, yeah, life‘s little luxuries I guess. Have a look at the Eddi from myenergy. Pretty cool power diverter to minimize the amount of solar you send back to the grid. I installed one at my house and it has dropped my gas usage for heating water in summer to zero.
2:25 i see you have miele appliances. do they have miele at home? do you use it? does it require an internet connection? 10:08 isn't there a better way to control those towel heaters? i'm thinking some kind of sensor (a temperature and humidity sensor?) that detects when someone has a shower and then turns the towel heaters on to dry the towels. do you have an exhaust fan in your bathroom? a fan will get rid of the warm humid air in the bathroom, and then that air has to be replaced by cold outside air which needs to be heated up which requires energy. that's why i think a dehumidifier would be a better option.
I think my Miele appliances are too old to have the smart software, and it definitely relies on the cloud and an internet connection so I'm reluctant to use it. Using humidity is a clever idea. I'll have to think on it some more
@@HomeAutomationGuyif those appliances require the cloud, that's no bueno. So if my numbers come up, I'll have to either find a way to use it without giving it access to the internet, or not use it at all. When and how i use my appliances is no business of theirs.
@@youyuberh not a bad idea, that. But I would push that button BEFORE I had a shower or a bath, just to give the towels more time to heat up. Also, I would probably set the thermostat higher than normal to heat up the whole bathroom. It can then be set back to normal (22 degrees?) after a certain amount of time. And a dehumidifier in the bathroom wouldn't hurt either.
I also don’t understand it but I had the identical issues with our Miele dishwasher. Once I removed the smart plug, it went back to working perfectly again.
Got me a bit concerned, cause I put in Shelly plus 1PMs behind many of my wall sockets, hoping to do sth similar in a few months... But a good tip to have in mind in case I need to do some debugging 🙂 Edit: I wanted to ask about your experience with Miele wrt Home Assistant, but just read another comment below.
Living in a London terrace house, I am not sure where I would physically put an air sourced heat pump. I saw one at a friend's house and it's about twice the size of my air conditioning compressor and it was hard enough finding a place for that!
I had a similar experience with my dishwasher. The smart plug actually killed it. To make that smart I just ended up using those little button presser robots
I find that the power monitoring Zigbee plugs send a huge amount of data over the Zigbee network, especially when you have a lot of them, and this can drown out important Zigbee messages like "turn the light on". For this reason I've switched to WiFi plugs for the ones that do power monitoring and use Zigbee for the simple on/off plugs only.
@@HomeAutomationGuy good to know. I’ve looked up the switches you’re using and there seems to be 2 options - espHome or tasmota. Which did you go for? Or is that another video?!
I went for Tasmota because I wanted an excuse to learn about Tasmota. But if you already use ESPHome, then I'd suggest using that. Or if you already use Tasmota for other things, then choose that. They're both great, they're both open source and local so equally good
We all discover at some point that Windows laptops will not resume from power off. They used to under windows 7. I imagine windows servers can do though so it must be possible. They used to have the ability to wake on LAN too but don't seem capable of that either. Something Microsoft needs to sort out for the Home Automation future.
@@HomeAutomationGuy oeps sorry! I ment the Solar production and peak time notification. That is really cool and exactly what I am looking for but can’t get it working
Towel rails to heat the towels before showering or might need to dry them? Ok no wonder the planet heats up. My smart home uses around 120W while I'm away or asleep. Nothing gets turned on when I'm not there or using it. Solar power triggers the boiler in my kitchen and when I need the dishwasher to run, I plan it on high solar power hours. When there has been no sun, I use a kettle to heat water, when needed.
You haven't properly described what was happening to your dishwasher, but I am guessing it was simply... it wasn't finishing and you didn't know why. I have encountered similar situation in case of clothes washer and I know the reason. Most smart plugs are rated for max of 2400W (240V 10A) and dishwasher is awfully close to that during heating. So in my case it was overcurrent protection kicking in, switching the plug on and off with me returning and wondering what has happened. There could be plenty of reasons why overcurrent wasn't initially meddling, but started over time. My recommendation would be to switch to bulkier smart "plug" (something like sonoff pow) rated for 25A+ and check.
I would agree with this, but it worked fine for 8 months and then started consistently failing. Why would the current rating change? It's still a mystery to me
@@HomeAutomationGuyI have two guesses. Traces leading from relay to prongs of plug have specific width and resistance. If you heat and cool them down daily, their resistance might raise, thus raising power draw and tripping over-current protection. Other guess I have is related to months - in summer I have steady 245V up to sometimes 252V if a lot of photovoltaics are trying to push electricity to grid. In winter, there are moments when I even have 220V in grid, thus requiring more Amps to power device, thus tripping the device. Both are wild guesses from someone that has below cursory understanding of electronics, but all return to idea that dishwasher needs 2200~2400WW, and if voltage drops due to lower voltage in grid or higher resistance, it will need more amps to power up device, thus tripping overcurrent protection (which is actually based on amps).
Btw, I have one more recommendation, since I didn't notice it on screen - APC has integration to home assistant which allows to check two things. Input voltage (which would help you with diagnosing my second wild guess) and via template you can calculate power draw, thus eliminating need for one smart plug. {% if states('binary_sensor.ups_online_status') -%} {{ (states('sensor.ups_load') | float) / 100 * (states('sensor.ups_nominal_output_power') | float) }} {%- else -%} 0 {%- endif %}
Possibly carbon build up on the relay contacts indicating a rating issue as others have suggested. You may need to use the said smart plug to activate an intermediate/ higher rated relay. You would lose the native power usage of course.@@HomeAutomationGuy
500W on idle ? my house is 4+1 over 120m and i am idling on 80W, that's mainly freezer and refrigerator. 500W is where everything is working during the day... LEDs everywhere, TV not running on max brightness.. but 500W idle ? maaaan
500W is a lot. That's enough to grow plants in your loft. I put in automation to save electricity. Never paid for an electrician, that's a huge waste of money. Better to do it properly yourself any day
Why dont you just set one automarion to turn on the towel heater when the humidity in the bathroom gets to certain level and then falls to a certain point, rather than doing it based on times ? I hate time based automarions. Like for example, why not set heating based on presence? Finished. Thats what ive done for all my infrared heating panels for all the rooms in the house
I only shower in one of my bathrooms, the other bathroom has hand towels which get wet from drying our hands after washing them. The humidity in those bathrooms doesn't really change when we wash our hands, but if we don't run the towel rails then the towels get dank and stinky. I should probably switch over the en-suite towel rail automation to be humidity based, because that's where we shower, but will that make the towels toasty and warm for when I get out of the shower? I don't think it would be on long enough as I only shower for a few minutes.
When we first built our home I went through this exercise and had it all dialed in nicely but then we purchased a hot tub, and that offset all my efforts and more. Turning off computers has a big impact
Yeah, but the hot tub brings you joy and if you use it a lot then it's no problem! The idea is to reduce wasted energy
Good to have you back
Thank you!
Nice.
One thing I noticed from monitoring home device usage over the years with Home Assistant (and HACS Powercalc) was how little energy LED bulbs require vs output.
Even though my parents homes don't have home automation, during the price hike in energy costs a couple of years ago I got them to make an inventory of their bulbs and I replaced them all with LED equivalents. I took on the upfront cost, but the long term saving for them has been huge (esp replacing halogen bulbs).
My own home is pretty efficient and, like yours, it uses automations combined + zigbee buttons so nothing stays on standby, but there was still one big power leach that niggled away at my brain.
My main "big" PC, which has an Nvidia GPU for both home work and play is something I use a lot for both remote working and play at night. I justified the cost as it's a tool I use a lot, so why not. On idle it consumes 250+w and when gaming it easily ramps up to 450W+. In the end the "this could be done better" won the fight in my head.
We have a headless Lenovo Tiny PC that's used as a low power remote access for when we're away (and to manage some security cameras). So instead of that coming on when not_home, I hooked it up to my monitor and started instead to use it as my daily driver and now only using the big PC in the evening when gaming or for other stuff that properly makes use of the GPU. This one thing is saving us at least £250/yr
I bought it years ago from eBay, but if I was to get it again today, it would've paid for itself within 4 months.
That server rack power consumption is wild for a somewhat simple use case
Yep
500W idle for the house is a lot of power. I currently have a idle load of the house of around 119W with 1 of the biggest power draw of 40W comes from the Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro SE with 2 Wifi 6 pro accesspoints. An other high load is the ventilation heatpump for hot water and heat at idle with a power draw of 33W. My server just consumed around 11W at idle, but I do not have a local file store on it. Hope you can figure out to draw less power.
Great video, that base load is a killer! Did a similar survey for our house, and frustrated to discover there was no one big 'thing' that I could turn off over night to save some power. I think the best candidate was the TV antenna booster, but even that was less than 10W.
The feedback on the energy usage is an absolute brilliant idea, getting 'buy in' from everyone in the house is key to energy saving, keeping it simple Green - good, Red - Bad, also great. I had an old Squeezebox music player with a nice bright VFD display showing the energy generated / imported, which worked really well. However my family did struggle with the scale of the numbers, like "look wow we are generating 300 units, best put the washing on".
I'd be wary of that switch, the relay may be shot and not closing properly, drawing 3KW across it in that state could cause a fire. One of my biggest concerns with getting smart switches off Amazon that are not quite as good as advertised.
I see what you did there with your comment about your fridge/freezer power monitoring.
Very cool!
Nice and some good ideas. Towel warmers are really a first world problem!!! "When I saw young ..." :) Dry yourself in the shower enclosure. The perception of heat stays for a while after you turn off the hot water. Stepping out of the shower gives you an immediate sharp temperature change! Give it a try.
Here the bathrooms aren't very well ventilated so the towel warmers are mainly to make them dry and not smell like wet dog.
When i have a shower, i open the door just wide enough to stick my hand out and grab the towel (no towel heater for me 😞). When the towel is inside, I close the door again while I use the towel.
Remember, you always gotta know where your towel is 🙂.
More like this please!! I've found new parts of HA from this video. I've pulled up six months of energy logging on my house, that i didn't know about, and have a very good idea where all my power is being used. I had not been tracking the power on my Shelly controlled lights (turned that on today) and will get some smart controllers on the Sonos speakers when i get home.
I may be late to the party here but why do you need to have the towel rails on a schedule at all? You need to heat the towels when you shower and for a finite amount of time after that. How long does it take to heat the towels from a standing start? Use a humidity sensor to identify that someone is using the shower to trigger the towel rail. My towel rail is at temperature well within the time i can be in the shower. You then need a helper to control how long it stays on after that. Same deal for the guest bathroom, or when you're on holidays, or choose to be stinky and go to bed untubbed. Why turn the towel rail on unless you KNOW someone is ging to need a heated towel.
One thing I've learned from years of industrial experience is to measure the thing you're trying to see, and not try to predict it.
I'm only in the shower for a couple of minutes, and I find that the towel isn't warm by the time I'm done from a standing start. We also have the towels on the warmer that we dry our hands with after washing our hands, and that doesn't trigger the humidity sensor unfortunately. This is why I use the schedule.
A lot of people have had success with the humidity method though - it's a great idea!
Request for video on how to set up guest and holiday switches for Home Assistant. - Awesome to see your videos returning
Thanks for the suggestion and for the kind words! ☺️
Second to this. A holiday mode explanation would be amazing.
@@HomeAutomationGuydo you trigger your holiday mode manually or automatically? i think it would be a good idea to do both. manually using a button or whatever, and automatically when no-one is home for a day or 2, or whatever makes sense to you.
@@mrxmry3264 I do it manually at the moment, because I don't go on that many holidays 😞
I use several input boolean helpers as flags. Turn on the mode, the flag turns on. The automations check for the status of the flags as a conditional. Guest Mode runs different HVAC and other things, Party mode turns up the heat and stops automatic light off routines and disables the motion sensor lights outside, Vacation Mode turns off water heaters, closes the water valve, lowers the HVAC settings, etc.
great video! My guess with the dishwasher is that a capacitor in the smart switch is degrading over time, causing increased EMI emissions that (to your point) interfere with the dishwaser electronics. To test the theory, try powering the dishwasher using an extension lead from a power outlet a few metres away, and put the smart plug on the outlet. Not a permanent solution, but might point to what the problem is.
could the opposite be true? my dishwasher started acting up when I removed my smart plug. any tips on how to test this?
Fantastic to see such an in-depth dive into truly understanding your energy usage.
Top notch video!
The reason the dishwasher stopped working with the smart plug is probably the smart plugs power got real dirty and dirty power is a thing that creates unusual stuff like that.
Dishwashers are hard on power with the booster heating and the way it switches. One in the same circuit as a standard refrigerator wreaks havoc on it, that happened to me when some restoration guys were stupid. I've seen "perfectly good" power supplies mess with computer motherboards in ways that make no sense.
Thanks for the video you gave me a solution to a problem I have.
I agree. It could even be that the smart switch is glitching out on current peaks.
Came to the comments section thinking the same thing re current/power peaks.
Does your elecrtricity meter have a P1 port? If not, have you considered asking your electricity provider if they could install a new meter that has one? Even if it has one, you might have to ask your provider to turn the port on. Mine has, so I asked them to turn the port on, connected a RJ12 cable to the port, ordered a little device that was basically an RJ12 socket on a circuit board, connected an ESP8266 to it, installed ESPHome, and from then on, all my meter readings are stored in Home Assistant. And while the device I made was a kludge that required a bit of soldering, there are several ready to use devices you can buy, that plug into the P1 port and work with Home Assistant out of the box.
Also, does your "holiday mode" do any of those old tricks like having lights on for a few hours in the evening to make it look like someone's home? I guess you could set it to move your curtains a few times a day too...
Excellent video Alan. I do like the LED changing color - based on status of the Solar/Grid energy. Which we just had installed last week. Nice to have you back again!
Thanks so much 🙏
I‘m eager diving into the topic of energy optimisation, as we bought an old shed as well recently.
I've used Tapo p110 WiFi smart plugs with energy monitoring to smarten up my dishwasher.
I have Home Assistant switch the plug on when the night rate electricity starts at 2am. So I just have to start a wash and then tell Alexa to turn off the plug a few seconds in. Then at 2am the wash will properly start when the plug is turned back on. Very basic but very useful.
I also use Home Assistant with the power monitoring of the plug to announce that the dishwasher is finished so someone can unload it. Not very useful at 4am, but it is great when doing ad-hoc washes during the day or evening.
Loving the plant lights.
Me too!
I really like how this RGB lights changes to green when solar energy is "wasted" by exporting to grid and it's time to use it for something. I think I'll borrow it for my system in the future.
Glad you like it! Good luck getting your set up 😍
Our towel warmer is linked to the shower light and fan. It does turn on on a timer prior to shower time. But it only turns on for the extended period after a shower to dry the towels if the shower light and fan were both turned on for more than 2 minutes, and then the light is turned off. The fan is on an hour timer after this sequence and so is the towel warmer.
Very cool automation! Thanks for sharing!
Some humidity sensors in the bathrooms would help with the control of the towel rails. I am thinking of adding some to my HA install to help refine the control of our MVHR system
Thanks for the suggestions. I have implemented most of them. As an aside I notice you have Heatmisser. We have an 8 zone gas powered variant. There are a couple of things I have done to optimise gas usage when we are away. First I have changed the Away temp in the zones to 7c. There is a bug in the android app, so you need to get them to do it or use a different app. Additionally I have removed all scheduling from Heatmisser and moved it in to Home assistant using a combination of a calendar with repeating events and some automations to change the target temps. It works really well and means HA can tightly control the house heating, especially when we are away. Out of interest my home base level is 4Kwh per day for electricity. This covers our internet, home assistant server and smart plugs, switches.
What I do for my lights since I live on my own is have 1 master switch function, that turns off ANY lights that are on in the rest of the house if I turn the bedroom light OFF, from my bed.
This saves the headache of finding a light still ON, when I come back later [only 2 exceptions are the smart light switches that are connected to a light with build in motion sensor [toilet/hallway]]
For heating I have it set so that I don't use the climate panel buttons but my own to turn on the HEAT. I use custom buttons that are connected to a automation I can disable/enable trough a childlock.
it can also only run during the winter. to prevent accidentally turning it on in the dead of summer finding your house at a TOASTY 50C. and the heater running at FULL power.
Still optimizing a few things more like smart blinds to prevent draft from the windows.
Put the towel racks on a humidity sensor. Once it goes past a certain humidity level, turn on the towel rack for an hour.
That helps with drying the towels, but doesn't help with the first world problem of preheated tiles for when you come out of a 3 or 4 minute long shower
Regarding your dishwasher; My best guess is that the switch mode power supply in your smart plug is radiating conducted immersions in to the AC line at some hormonic of SMPS. This is in turn affects the control circuit of your dishwasher because the VCC filter of the control card does not filter it out and creates noise in the control electronic circuit.
I would try another smart plug ( different brand) That might have less or different frequency conducted immersion.
Well that is just my guess
Would definitely love to see that morning routine video!
My smart plugs also started playing up similarly to yours, I figured they just aren’t designed for the spikey surges (3kw) of electricity.
Maybe! The ones on the washer and dryer have held up for over three years, so fingers crossed
If you have smart shades, consider raising them to let more sunlight in if you are heating the house. Likewise, consider lowering them when you are cooling the house.
Great content as always! Good to have you back man
Thank you! I appreciate the comment 🙏
Mate, what a brilliant video! I've regularly been watching yours and a few other known TH-cam channels for home automation. This episode is by far the best value of all I've watched! As any enthusiast, I also love a new gadget or a new automation but most of them are for the fun! whereas this whole video was spot on for an awesome reason! Thank you for sharing all your experiences and ideas! I will definitely make a project of each one that I don't use yet, repurposing smart plugs, meters, etc.
On your issue with the dishwasher, have you thought about electromagnetic interference from your smart plug into the dishwasher control board? It is not common but not impossible. to test it, just move the smart plug away from the dishwasher (i.e. use a testing extension cord so it is located a couple of meters away from your dishwasher). If that fixes, you can probably swap by another smart plug that uses other wireless protocols (e.g. ZigBee wifi). " Why would it have only started after 8 months?" possibly due to a change in the frequency/wifi channel if you currently use wifi. good luck!
If you feel that this topic generates interest, you could do another chapter focused on the devices that can be used to help with energy monitoring and efficiency (other clamps, all the smart plugs with energy monitoring capability, even smart appliances, etc. ) and also sharing/publishing some of the automation templates or dashboards on that topic that you've found useful. you could even get into solar systems integrations with HA or EV chargers integrations - for example, the phone app called Charge HQ is simple and does a fantastic job of charging EVs with excess from solar via API integration between solar systems and EV chargers rather than letting it go back to the grid.
About the towel rails - if you use a water flow sensor or a leak detector to determine when someone is having a shower, maybe you could use that to automate turning on the towel rails afterwards. Then it doesn't matter what time of day you have a shower, and it allows for not turning them on if there's no need.
There's a better way than a water flow sensor. I researched quite a bit and found that by adding a humidity sensor near the shower, HA can take not the derivative of the sensor, but instead the second derivative of the humidity. That is, rate at which the rate of change in humidity is occurring. A guy on the forum created this strategy (not me) to control a bathroom fan. I use it to control a towel bar and its works really well. I have it on a timer on days that I know I'll be showering before work, and it pre-heats on those days. Monday and Friday + weekend, my system detects a shower and runs for 2 hours after that point. Works really well.
Thanks for a WOW investigation which help understand more benefits of the automation
For server power usage, have a look at tuned. This should reduce power usage without affecting performance too much. You should be able to create an initial profile with powertop.
Thanks for the tip! I never knew about that
@@HomeAutomationGuy no worries! It's also useful within VM's, not just the hypervisor(s). I managed to get one of my servers down to ~10-15w idle. But my larger server unfortunately doesn't go to a lower cstate.
4:30 it's because they fail at some point. Same problem with these plugs here and in the end you could not turn them off and on again with the phone anymore.
I've had more than a couple of smart plugs that have gone a bit wonky and decided to flick the power off and on, randomly. Seems to happen on plugs that I'm using for monitoring power use, and never switched off, so the relay is always on. Not sure if it's the relay coil "burning out" from being on all the time or something else. If yours was doing that during a cycle, it would certainly affect the dishwashing. We really need a non-relay power monitoring device
I'm 100% off the grid/solar with no utilities for 50 miles or more. I use home automation to reduce the amount of electricity and match my usage with available sunshine. My various hubs and devices draw less than 75 watts total. Very minimal
Math, science, and magic. Love it!
I mean, it's magical to me!
My house uses around 80 watts at idle. My total power draw for a day is 2.8 kwh all in including the fridge which is around the 400w per day mark. I did a lot of work finding out what drew power at idle or standby and pulled it down via smart switching if it’s idle pull is more than the consumption of the smart switch. I do have an even lower power mode if I am away for any length of time as well.
I'm a long way from 80W, but I'll keep chipping away at it where I can.
I might even have to turn off the wine fridge 😕
Im looking at buying an Emporia Vue, got a few of their plugs too
I've never heard of a "towel rail" before. If I were automating it I'd turn it on when there's motion detected in the shower. You may have a more regimented day than I do but I haven't showered on a schedule since I quit playing organized sports.
Interesting video, I have a solar array on my farm. I’m going to watch your video on monitoring energy usage, it would be interesting to set something similar up.
Good way to store solar power is in water heater. If you insulate it well or buy a good quality one, you can store warm water for days and use the preheated water as input to the gas furnace so i doesnt have to heat up the water as much. Or if the math works out, get water heater with integrated heat pump (much cheaper than actuall heat pump for outside of the house). It cools the outside (like fridge but other way around) and heats the water inside with much better CoP. It can be an issue if you have it in small room which will get cold, but if you put it in the same room as the furnace, you can turn the waste heat of furnace into warm water. It sounds complicated, but we both love home assistant, so nothing is too complicated :)
Edit: By having the small heat pump you can get much more of your small solar panel array, that you cant expand. In my country (Czechia), you can get power billing by the hour with smart power meter (from power company) and even plan when to heat the water, so it might be cheaper than using gas, but that depends on prices available to you. Here it sometimes get even in to negative price per kWh. They even tell you what the prices will be for next 24h.
Anyways, love your channel. I would love some videos about user friendly no app automations and heat schedules in HA.
Check your smart plug amp rating for dishwasher . That could be reason for your problem . Either it’s not supplying enough amp or it’s broke . Since It was working and now not . I would focus on the smart plug
I love this video and gained so many great ideas for my smart home, thanks for that!
How did you link your solar power to Home Assistant?
Thank you for video. And hello from Ukraine🙂
Hi 👋❤️
I put my heated towel rack on a humidity sensor and if the light is turned on in the bathroom.
I'm ok using a non- heated towel when I shower.
Thanks for the nice overview. Please let us know what kind of switches you use for Washer & Dryer. Both appliances use more than 2,500 Watts peak and so shelly Smart Plugs are not usable. Also would like to know how you switch on the Washer & Dryer, as most have Start-buttons to press. I have older Miele appliances and cannot start them just electrically.
Thanks in advance for some insights.
Did you ever overcome this?
@@chrisc_1012 No - still pressing buttons when I wan tto start the machines. Not a big deal, but when you have other things automated, people ask questions and then I look quite dumb
Great video Alan. The smart plugs how accurate are they?
I have some that overestimate the voltage saying I have 245 to 250 v all the time. This will then under estimate the power usage. I have been using the Kassa Tp Link KP115 ones and they look to be closer to the real value.
Hi, great video. Would a water sensor in the shower linked to towel rail minimise power usage? I’m not sure if a towel would warm up in the time it takes to have a shower but it would accommodate showers at any time.
Please make a video about the power devices, more details about the devices.
The only thing i have heard is to use a humidity sensor in the bathroom to turn towel rails on or off that could possibly be better than your scheduled turn off after shower. Thanks for sharing.
Oooh good idea! But then will the towels still be toasty warm before the shower? 😏
@@HomeAutomationGuythey don't have to be, they just have to be warm when you step out of the shower.
Great video I’d like to hear how you automated your wake up/ morning routine
Can you do a video comparing inverter back up UPS systems please?
@HomeAutomatoinGuy You just inadvertently justified having home energy storage (batteries) when talking about net metering: or "why you should always buy battery storage if you are buying solar panels."
My house came with panels but no batteries when I bought it. I'm not even sure where I would physically put batteries...
@@HomeAutomationGuy I think you are spot on here and definitely not alone. I really think builders are going to have to start accounting for this stuff in their designs. When I look at the integrated heat-pump plus water heaters it gets even worse.
Thanks for the energy plug recommendation - those local bytes plugs must be the best kept secret lol. Just bought 3 - you need an affiliate link lol
You need to fill up that wine cooler, even if it's with water bottles as the mass will help use less power once it has cooled down.
That makes sense! But forget the water, it's time to buy more wine!
I found that one of my smart plugs was disconnecting from WiFi every so often and clicking the relay off and on again when it reconnected. Sometimes this was long enough for device to reset. Did wonder what the clicking noise was..
Ah that's interesting! That could be related to my problem
I have another problem with one of my smart plugs, the one that controls the fan (or maybe the fan is the problem? I dunno). Anyway, when I turn the fan on, sometimes the fan doesn't start, and the smart plug switches off again after a few seconds. So I wrote an automation that gets triggered when the fan is turned on, waits 15 seconds and then checks if the fan switch is on. If not, it turns it on again, re-triggering itself in the process. Sometimes it takes several attempts to get that fan running.
Keep your wine fridge full (but not over full) to keep power costs down. An empty fridge loses more "cold" when you open the door compared to a full one.
Perfect, now I have to order more wine. 🍷🍾❤️
@@HomeAutomationGuy lucky guy! ;)
Hi Alan, many thanks for a very informative piece. I appreciate (living in Leeds) how little of that Strange Orange Globe we see in the sky, which obviously affects your solar input - given that output "money back" is low , how about a battery system ? I I have no solar myself, having to live in a Wrinklies Stalag, so my observations are all from watching and listening, not using. I did take note that your wine cooler is using so much, strange but could simply be a bad buy. Washing (dish and clothes) could possibly be improved with better research, but I would wait until you actually need to change, it's all about cost at the end of the day. I find your power monitoring very much "eye opening", informative and note worthy. Thanks again.
Thanks for the note! Apart from the wine cooler I've just been using the appliances that came with the property. I will definitely be researching energy efficiency (and possible smart capabilities) if and when things need to be replaced
As for a battery system, I can't make the return on investment calculations work for me and then there's the physical space they'll take up too
I use a power provider that passes on real time wholesale rates and one of my biggest power users is the pool pump which is about 1.3kw for up to 8 hours a day. I use a node red flow to use forecasts to determine when the cheapest time of day will be to run it and automatically turn it on and off during the day to achieve this. I have nearly halved the cost of running the pump
Nice! Do you have any safeguards to make sure it runs at least once a day, and not too close together in time? Sounds like a great problem to solve with automations!
Have you heard of bubble pumps? They give you high flow rates but low pressures, for a fraction of the power that a regular pump requires. If the low head is not a problem, you could save A LOT of power. One solar panel should be enough to power the air pump.
Sounds like you have a standard fixed speed pump, in which case you should buy a pool pump inverter that just inserts into the power supply to the pump and is designed to control the pump speed. The magic comes that the power usage is almost the square of the pump speed, so reducing it will give enormous savings. As an example, I have a pump that consumes 0.75 kW at full speed. Using an inverter (I have a "Clever Pool" device from Plastica) and reducing the pump speed to 1/3 of the original ("Low" speed setting) results in it consuming one seventh of the power (0.1 kW). You can still control the speed, so have it high for backwashing, but for general running it is almost certain that 1/3 of the speed is plenty. Using this (and I also control pump timing using Home Assistant) saves me an eye-watering £1500 a year, which is many times more than the cost of the inverter.
@@mrxmry3264 rental house, no choice sadly
@@HomeAutomationGuy There is a small buffer to ensure that the forecasts are not wildly out, but it does tend to turn on and off during the day as the pricing changes. If it doesn't quite do the 8 hours, then it's not a big deal. It also tends to be the same portion of the day, after the morning peak and before the early evening peak so mostly contiguous. I am considering changing to work on a weekly total to catch up if a day is very cheap and it's behind because of expensive days, but this new automation has not been running long, so I want to monitor for a while.
Which Wled Controller and LEDs are you using in plants..looking pretty cool
Dig2Go's from QuinLED
IMHO: About dishwasher - smart plug just can't handle load and with time contacts is overheat and loose possibility to provide constant power. If it's plug contact pair - you can see it changed colour, if it is relay - just test on high load.
It makes me realise I can probably move some plugs about to turn more of my audio visual equipment off. must remember to leave the Sky Q box and network switch on though.
Yeah. I have two power strips each on my desk and TV cabinet. One for "gets switched off" and one for "always on"
holy crap are towel warmer racks a common thing in the UK? I mean obviously its a luxury addon but like is it common enough that most people have seen it or could reasonably obtain it
Many bathrooms in the UK have a towel warmer rack that is plumbed into the central heating system. It doubles as the radiator for that room.
Why not put a humidity sensor in the bathroom and turn on the towel rail when the humidity increases? So it would switch on when someone is showering or taking a bath.
It takes too long for the towel rail to warm up. By the time the humidity sensor notices that I'm in the shower, I'm already getting out and my towel is still cold 😞
@@HomeAutomationGuy hehe, yeah, life‘s little luxuries I guess. Have a look at the Eddi from myenergy. Pretty cool power diverter to minimize the amount of solar you send back to the grid. I installed one at my house and it has dropped my gas usage for heating water in summer to zero.
Good information. But that part of you putting the washing in the machine had me for a second 😂
Haha. I didn't think anyone would notice
Can you share the automation for the plant wleds please?
Very useful video, thanks!
You're welcome!
Love it, super informative video :)!
2:25 i see you have miele appliances. do they have miele at home? do you use it? does it require an internet connection?
10:08 isn't there a better way to control those towel heaters? i'm thinking some kind of sensor (a temperature and humidity sensor?) that detects when someone has a shower and then turns the towel heaters on to dry the towels.
do you have an exhaust fan in your bathroom? a fan will get rid of the warm humid air in the bathroom, and then that air has to be replaced by cold outside air which needs to be heated up which requires energy. that's why i think a dehumidifier would be a better option.
I think my Miele appliances are too old to have the smart software, and it definitely relies on the cloud and an internet connection so I'm reluctant to use it.
Using humidity is a clever idea. I'll have to think on it some more
@@HomeAutomationGuyif those appliances require the cloud, that's no bueno. So if my numbers come up, I'll have to either find a way to use it without giving it access to the internet, or not use it at all. When and how i use my appliances is no business of theirs.
@@HomeAutomationGuy or just a button to press when you have taken the bath. and the towel heaters will turn on when the electricty is cheap
@@youyuberh not a bad idea, that. But I would push that button BEFORE I had a shower or a bath, just to give the towels more time to heat up. Also, I would probably set the thermostat higher than normal to heat up the whole bathroom. It can then be set back to normal (22 degrees?) after a certain amount of time. And a dehumidifier in the bathroom wouldn't hurt either.
@@youyuberhsometimes the best solution is the simplest! I like the button idea
I also don’t understand it but I had the identical issues with our Miele dishwasher. Once I removed the smart plug, it went back to working perfectly again.
😯
Got me a bit concerned, cause I put in Shelly plus 1PMs behind many of my wall sockets, hoping to do sth similar in a few months... But a good tip to have in mind in case I need to do some debugging 🙂 Edit: I wanted to ask about your experience with Miele wrt Home Assistant, but just read another comment below.
@@mbinic I have Shelly Plus 1PMs behind my fridge, ventilation system and a few other places and have so far not had any issues! 🤞
@HomeAutomationGuy I really can't stand wall warts (smart plugs). Have you investigated actual wall outlets with power monitoring?
Yes, but using a wall wart I can easily move around my plugs if I want to move my desk or TV for example without having to change the outlets
Great vid! But holy heck a 500w base load is high!
It's a lot lower than my peak load! 😬
Be interesting if you put in a air sourced heat pump, got rid of gas and see how you automate all that
Living in a London terrace house, I am not sure where I would physically put an air sourced heat pump. I saw one at a friend's house and it's about twice the size of my air conditioning compressor and it was hard enough finding a place for that!
I had a similar experience with my dishwasher. The smart plug actually killed it. To make that smart I just ended up using those little button presser robots
my server rack uses around 700 watts
Mulțumim!
Thank you so much 🙏❤️
Very useful!
Glad it was helpful!
Are the smart plugs you’re using WiFi rather than zigbee? If so what made you go for these over a zigbee based smart plug?
I find that the power monitoring Zigbee plugs send a huge amount of data over the Zigbee network, especially when you have a lot of them, and this can drown out important Zigbee messages like "turn the light on". For this reason I've switched to WiFi plugs for the ones that do power monitoring and use Zigbee for the simple on/off plugs only.
@@HomeAutomationGuy good to know. I’ve looked up the switches you’re using and there seems to be 2 options - espHome or tasmota. Which did you go for? Or is that another video?!
I went for Tasmota because I wanted an excuse to learn about Tasmota. But if you already use ESPHome, then I'd suggest using that. Or if you already use Tasmota for other things, then choose that. They're both great, they're both open source and local so equally good
Very illuminating. I'm now sat in the dark:
We all discover at some point that Windows laptops will not resume from power off. They used to under windows 7. I imagine windows servers can do though so it must be possible. They used to have the ability to wake on LAN too but don't seem capable of that either. Something Microsoft needs to sort out for the Home Automation future.
I see
Dishwasher, just replace relay in the plug and problem should definitely disappear 😊.
Interesting, I am running our towel dryer for 3 hours each cycle. This will make me shorten that time.
Can you please share the code for the notification? I can't get it work ;)
Which notification is that?
@@HomeAutomationGuy oeps sorry! I ment the Solar production and peak time notification. That is really cool and exactly what I am looking for but can’t get it working
Towel rails to heat the towels before showering or might need to dry them? Ok no wonder the planet heats up. My smart home uses around 120W while I'm away or asleep. Nothing gets turned on when I'm not there or using it. Solar power triggers the boiler in my kitchen and when I need the dishwasher to run, I plan it on high solar power hours.
When there has been no sun, I use a kettle to heat water, when needed.
I'm guessing you don't live in a dark cold country like the UK
@@HomeAutomationGuy North of the Netherlands, so its colder than London.
@@LennertBakker Well done! That's awesome energy saving!
You haven't properly described what was happening to your dishwasher, but I am guessing it was simply... it wasn't finishing and you didn't know why. I have encountered similar situation in case of clothes washer and I know the reason. Most smart plugs are rated for max of 2400W (240V 10A) and dishwasher is awfully close to that during heating. So in my case it was overcurrent protection kicking in, switching the plug on and off with me returning and wondering what has happened.
There could be plenty of reasons why overcurrent wasn't initially meddling, but started over time. My recommendation would be to switch to bulkier smart "plug" (something like sonoff pow) rated for 25A+ and check.
I would agree with this, but it worked fine for 8 months and then started consistently failing. Why would the current rating change? It's still a mystery to me
@@HomeAutomationGuyI have two guesses. Traces leading from relay to prongs of plug have specific width and resistance. If you heat and cool them down daily, their resistance might raise, thus raising power draw and tripping over-current protection.
Other guess I have is related to months - in summer I have steady 245V up to sometimes 252V if a lot of photovoltaics are trying to push electricity to grid. In winter, there are moments when I even have 220V in grid, thus requiring more Amps to power device, thus tripping the device.
Both are wild guesses from someone that has below cursory understanding of electronics, but all return to idea that dishwasher needs 2200~2400WW, and if voltage drops due to lower voltage in grid or higher resistance, it will need more amps to power up device, thus tripping overcurrent protection (which is actually based on amps).
Btw, I have one more recommendation, since I didn't notice it on screen - APC has integration to home assistant which allows to check two things. Input voltage (which would help you with diagnosing my second wild guess) and via template you can calculate power draw, thus eliminating need for one smart plug.
{% if states('binary_sensor.ups_online_status') -%}
{{ (states('sensor.ups_load') | float) / 100 * (states('sensor.ups_nominal_output_power') | float) }}
{%- else -%}
0
{%- endif %}
Possibly carbon build up on the relay contacts indicating a rating issue as others have suggested. You may need to use the said smart plug to activate an intermediate/ higher rated relay. You would lose the native power usage of course.@@HomeAutomationGuy
500W on idle ? my house is 4+1 over 120m and i am idling on 80W, that's mainly freezer and refrigerator.
500W is where everything is working during the day... LEDs everywhere, TV not running on max brightness.. but 500W idle ? maaaan
I guess our houses have different things running in them.
😊👍
6 access points?
What square footage?
Seems like a mansion lol
It's a UK Terrace house. Small footprint, tall, and basically a Faraday cage 😬
500W is a lot. That's enough to grow plants in your loft. I put in automation to save electricity. Never paid for an electrician, that's a huge waste of money. Better to do it properly yourself any day
If I grew certain plants in my loft I could even MAKE money from them 🤔
True 😂. My focus is self sufficiency and home automation is really helpful. As is your channel. Thanks
Why dont you just set one automarion to turn on the towel heater when the humidity in the bathroom gets to certain level and then falls to a certain point, rather than doing it based on times ? I hate time based automarions. Like for example, why not set heating based on presence? Finished. Thats what ive done for all my infrared heating panels for all the rooms in the house
I only shower in one of my bathrooms, the other bathroom has hand towels which get wet from drying our hands after washing them. The humidity in those bathrooms doesn't really change when we wash our hands, but if we don't run the towel rails then the towels get dank and stinky. I should probably switch over the en-suite towel rail automation to be humidity based, because that's where we shower, but will that make the towels toasty and warm for when I get out of the shower? I don't think it would be on long enough as I only shower for a few minutes.
Lots of Miele appliances...not cheap your living...
They came with the house 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah, miele is not cheap. Many prices are approaching the 5-digit range.
@@mrxmry3264 Not any more. My 15yr old Miele washing machine drum bearing failed and its replacement is far more efficient, wifi enabled and cost
Spend thousands to save a few hundreds?
Spend hundreds today to save thousands tomorrow.
I‘m eager diving into the topic of energy optimisation, as we bought an old shed as well recently.