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Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

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Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#101
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005657383634.html?spm=a2...

You're running all your flat's power through that $14 Chinese rubbish and never assumed that shortcuts were taken or quality would be an issue? How do you know it will continue to function as a circuit breaker and isn't just a piece of wire inside? For the uninitiated, CE marking is meaningless (it allows for self-certification). I'd like to see Big Clive do a teardown of one of those.

There are 2 ways to design these. They could use a regular relay, or they could use a solid state relay.

Solid state relays have widespread fraud. Like 60% of the ones on amazon will catch fire or fail before they hit the rated current. Trade suppliers generally don't sell them at >30 amps.

Regular relays up to 10 amps are cheap and reliable. Beyond that, they get expensive surprisingly fast, and the reliability is hit or miss. They fail in numerous ways, but the most concerning one is the plastic case melting and catching fire. The chance of failure depends on the nature of the load (capacitive or inductive loads will dramatically shorten a relays lifespan).

In my professional career, I have witnessed ~20 of the above devices failing, with melted bits or burn marks, but of that sample none has burned down a building, yet. But I'd say that was more down to luck than good design.

In general, I would trust a china-device for monitoring power, but not for switching anything more than ~10 amps (1 outlet).

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#102
post #66
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, which power breaker do you have?

This one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005657383634.html?spm=a2...

This is NOT a valid 63 Amps rated breaker, or 63 Amp anything for that matter. The screw terminal will melt.

Based on the screw terminal, without looking inside, I would rate it not higher than 10 Amps. Don't pass your whole apartment through it.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#103

I used IoTaWatt devices, which can be installed in panels. It is a great solution for by circuit monitoring, and has direct influxdb integration so you can use Grafana. Per plug monitoring is cool however for getting specific devices on a circuit. (Short video about the setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tcbJCvuJG8 )

I gotta chime in also. I just learned about your channel literally today when a buddy DM'd me a link on your YouTube homelab tour. We have pretty similar interests. I also have an IOTAWATT and I love it. My only grip is I wish they had the ability to log more channels with the same unit. ie Approximately 30 channels.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#104

One step further. I just installed the Emporia Vue 2 in my distribution box. 16 CTs plus the three mains phases. It's ESP32 based and there is a great ESPHome project that you can flash it with for local only reporting. Add some HA and VictoriaMetrics, and now I can see how the whole house behaves with Grafana. Next up, Zero-Export using this data to steer my little OpenDTU solar plant. We live in such cool times!

I bought a CURB Energy monitor about 6 years ago. Does anyone know if it's possible to flash open source firmware on it? It only has a cloud integration, but I would really like to hook it to to home assistant.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#105

One step further. I just installed the Emporia Vue 2 in my distribution box. 16 CTs plus the three mains phases. It's ESP32 based and there is a great ESPHome project that you can flash it with for local only reporting. Add some HA and VictoriaMetrics, and now I can see how the whole house behaves with Grafana. Next up, Zero-Export using this data to steer my little OpenDTU solar plant. We live in such cool times!

Is anyone aware of any other OSHW alternatives to this? Preferably with Ethernet. ESPHome would be preferable. The clones I can find are roughly the same price as the "original" hardware. ATM90E32AS seems to be ~$1 per channel on JLCPCB, so I'd imagine this could be pretty cheap with SMT assembly. My use case is like ~60 circuits.

Many people flash the emporia vue with espHome

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#106
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is preventing you from running Home Assistant core and deploying everything else yourself manually. Demanding the authors who gave you the software for free also provide support for an installation method they've offered up with no support is a bit ridiculous, don't you think? That attitude is what causes open source projects to die though...

What do you mean "demanding support" ? I remember Home Assistant authors being actively hostile to people packaging their software outside of the official Docker or RPi images. Which is why it wasn't in the Debian repository, pushing me down that Docker path in the first place. Here's the same dynamic on an associated project in 2021: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326 If anyone chimes in and says they've b…

So... your example is a developer of HA stating that he sees major flaws with how they're distributing his package, and that he has absolutely no interest in supporting users that pull his code in a way that is unmaintainable by him.

YOU believe he should support this anyway, because of various "we promise end-users won't reach out to you" which is comically incorrect because history has shown repeatedly that a user's first step when something is broken is to google package_name broken - which will absolutely turn up the author's name.

BECAUSE he doesn't want to support his software being repackaged in a way he believes isn't supportable, you're upset. You want him to support your unicorn config because that's what you want to do, and his refusal to comply makes him a bad person.

Thank you for reinforcing EXACTLY why open source devs burn out. He has a workflow that he is willing and able to support and doesn't want to support anything outside of that. Your response is: but you need to do it for me because it's what I want.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#107
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly within my gamut to jump into an embedded system to debug it, bringing/building tools as I go. I'm just not looking to opt into doing that on something that doesn't need to be that complex in the first place. Same reason I run one decently powerful amd64 server that does many things rather than a stack of Raspberry Pis, one per software package.

But how would you do it differently? You need to host a bunch of daemons (MQTT, ZWave and ZigBee bridges, and whatever else you might need). And a bunch of these daemons can have their own gnarly dependencies (e.g. they can be written in JS and built with NPM, ugh). So you kinda _need_ to use Docker to make it at least sane. And if you're using Docker for the plugins, then why not use it for the HA core itself? And o…

At the time my setup didn't require other daemons like that. But if I had been in that position, I would have just set up the other daemon under Debian and pointed HA at it.

These days I'd say that NixOS captures that requirement, allowing orchestration of many daemons and other system config to be abstracted into a packaged solution (eg NixOS Mailserver), that the user can override as much or as little as they'd like.

I believe NixOS does package (or at least attempts to package) HA, but given my past experience and what I believe is still the throw-it-over-the-wall desire of the HA maintainers, I'm wary of adopting it as an overarching solution. I'm certainly not ruling it out for performing some functions, like UI. I just would rather set up my automation efforts as MQTT-first, keep logging and automation rules as their own separate things, and not be fully committed to HA.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about distribution package managers, not pip.

I happily ran a dockerized HA on a Debian for years now, no need to do any complicated debugging (and even if I did, it would not be difficult to inspect it properly)

Dockerized HA on Debian is exactly what died on me. About 5-6 years ago. I'm sure it works just fine for most people. Just once bitten, twice shy.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#109
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "demanding support" ? I remember Home Assistant authors being actively hostile to people packaging their software outside of the official Docker or RPi images. Which is why it wasn't in the Debian repository, pushing me down that Docker path in the first place. Here's the same dynamic on an associated project in 2021: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326 If anyone chimes in and says they've b…

So... your example is a developer of HA stating that he sees major flaws with how they're distributing his package, and that he has absolutely no interest in supporting users that pull his code in a way that is unmaintainable by him. YOU believe he should support this anyway, because of various "we promise end-users won't reach out to you" which is comically incorrect because history has shown repeatedly that a user'…

Did we read the same thread? Nobody asked the HA developer to support anything, rather that developer started the conversation by making demands and then kept at it.

Re: Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

#110
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot about reliability issues with various wifi smart devices. I've had perfectly lovely reliability with wifi smart devices in my mixture of zigbee/wifi at home, such that I don't really have a preference. Except for one cheap ESP8266-based wifi relay module that had some liquid damage (not the module's fault), and the LED driver in my very first RGBW light bulb finding death after being used for a few years…

I’ve tried a handful of WiFi light bulbs, smart plugs, and other things. They were connected to a dedicated 2.4GHz access point (MikroTik as well). WiFi signal was fine—had good coverage (access point was central to the small wood frame house, and checking signal strength at device locations showed a great signal) and I live in the middle of a forest and there’s nothing else within range to interfere. Basically best…

Why sure. It's a rule that people who have the least amount of success with a thing will write the most about that thing. This is why those with their wits about them read things like Amazon reviews with a decent-sized grain of salt.

And yes, you're describing a very quiet environment in terms of outside interference. I'm seriously a little bit envious of that.

One thing that I am doing differently than what you were doing is this: I'm not isolating my smart-widgets to their own wifi access point, as I suspect most people also are not (since "most people" just have a single access point/all-in-one router for everything).

I built my little wifi network to have what I feel is good coverage in and around the whole house, with the intent that all devices (dozens of them) would use that same wifi SSID.

As an unintentional result of this combined network, if/when there's a problem with the do-all wireless network, I'm pretty likely to notice right away because things like my phone and my laptop won't work like they did yesterday.

And wifi problems have happened for me: For instance, before I went 100% Mikrotik, I was using an old once-fancy Asus router with third-party firmware as a combination of access point and switch for part of the house. It became increasingly unreliable as the years ticked on for whatever reason, and always came back to life after a quick reboot, but it eventually would turn stupid again anyway.

And whilst it was being stupid, various things would indeed break: The lights wouldn't turn on/off, or I'd see that my phone was using cellular data instead of wifi, or I'd say "Hey Google" and get "I can't connect to your Wifi" as a response. Madness, insanity. (And then I'd go unplug that router-shaped Asus access point for a few seconds, plug it back in, and things would be fine after a few minutes -- every time.)

But I have not at any time blamed the smart end-point devices (the wifi light bulbs, the switched outlets, the whatevers) for what was clearly -- in my case -- an infrastructure problem. (And having a particular old Asus router-box turn funky isn't indicative of a wifi-specific problem, either -- it's just indicative that this hardware had become increasingly broken over time.)

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