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What about non-techies?! How would they notice and react to such data harvesting behaviors in their homes' appliances, computers, phones, gadgets? I believe there must be a bare minimum of self-awareness to deal with the ever-evolving digital world we live in.
I created a wifi network for most of the smart appliances at home. It's nice that Unifi hardware lets you choose some of the higher-level wifi protocol options per-network, so I have a modern roaming-enabled 802.11 5GHz network for most devices, and the legacy 2.4GHz one for the fridge and stove to make use of.
> In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.
A megabyte a day still seems excessive.
Most likely that tracking acceptance is buried in some 500 page eula, but thats a separate issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
Siri set a timer for *looks at washer screen* minutes That's it. But tbh wish my smart speakers would learn all the appliance chimes instead.
I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
Can confirm, it's what I do. I can even detect which part of the cycle it is in using plain Home Assistant template sensors.
It's crude but it works. Detecting washing vs not is trivial, but I went the extra mile, looking at the power history and analysed the thing visually to get the general profile of each part, taking into account peaks, throughs, noise to have some unambiguous rules. Some are wrong if taken in isolation but taking the order of priority into account, flattening the result with if/elif in a single state sensor it becomes correct. That strategy is also very easy to debug visually with a entity history list in the dashboard.
I could probably also detect error states (which I had a few, like filter clogged with lint preventing water drain) as in this case the panel stays lit with the error code basically forever VS a normal cycle has it lit but ultimately it shuts down to deeper sleep states once it's done.
I really enjoy making dumb devices smart, it's a nice decoupling too and means I can just change e.g washing machine if it dies, adjust a few values below, and be all the merrier.
(nixos config, but it's a 1:1 to YAML and you get the idea)
services.home-assistant = {
#...
config = {
#...
template = [
# washing machine
# 5-6W: on (idle, panel lit)
# 4-5W: off (sleep after on, panel unlit)
# 0.1-1W: off (deep sleep)
# 2100-2200W: water heating
# noisy 8-100W, trough 10W: washing
# ramp-up 15-500W, plateau 300-500W, noisy 100W: spin dry
# 1300-1500W, trough 40W-150W: tumble dry
# 7.5-8W 240s, peak 95-105W, 20-25W 30s: cooldown
{
sensor = [
{
name = "washing_machine_power";
unit_of_measurement = "W";
state_class = "measurement";
state = "{{ states('sensor.shellyplusplugs_80646fc7bb4c_switch_0_power') }}";
}
{
name = "washing_machine_state";
state = ''
{% if is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_heating', 'on') %}
heating
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_drying', 'on') %}
drying
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_spinning', 'on') %}
spinning
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_cooling', 'on') %}
cooling
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_washing', 'on') %}
washing
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_idle', 'on') %}
idle
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_sleeping', 'on') %}
sleeping
{% elif states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | float(default=0) 30 }}
'';
delay_on = { minutes = 2; };
delay_off = { minutes = 2; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_heating";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1900 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
delay_off = { seconds = 10; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_drying";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1000 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) 30 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) 150 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) 6 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) 1 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) 0.01 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
I get significantly cheaper electricity at night ($0.12 vs > $0.50/kwh, stupid California). Being able to schedule saves money, not that WiFi is necessarily required.
You can use this to your advantage using a smart switch: start the wash cycle, turn off the power straight after. When you turn the power back on at a scheduled time (using the smart switch), the washing machine will pick up where it left off (at the beginning of the cycle).
Also a lot of them just have a timer built-in anyway.
I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
(yes, you still cannot run a mailserver at home, currently because we live in the age of Internet of Shit).
I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
Siri set a timer for *looks at washer screen* minutes That's it. But tbh wish my smart speakers would learn all the appliance chimes instead.