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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

#41

Post by baq »

whitehexagon wrote: post #38
baq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HA will happily run offline; if you mean HAOS then I don't know what it does but it's an unorthodox Linux distro, but once it installs it should also run offline without issues. I'm also using their skyconnect zigbee coordinator and it works very well.

Yeah one of the tests was a RPi image and it wouldnt complete without a LAN internet connection (only got 4G). And it seemed far too weighty for a bit of home automation. I recall the online requirement was for some ntp server requests that cant be disabled.

Yeah that's more of a rpi hardware requirement as it doesn't have a battery and you realistically want to have accurate time on your smart home controller, even - especially - after it cold boots after power loss.

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

#42

Post by Dalewyn »

ryall wrote: post #23

It's annoying that smart plugs/bulbs etc use wifi when Powerline exists

Powerline ethernet dumps an utterly horrifying amount of electrical noise into both the wiring and the surrounding area. Please don't use powerline unless you have no other solution.

Note: Powerline ethernet should not be confused with Power Over Ethernet which is perfectly fine.

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

#43

Post by rkagerer »

richardjennings wrote: post #31

I scrape power usage metrics from Tapo P110s and push them to Grafana Cloud using https://github.com/richardjennings/tapmon - although as other commenters have noted - using Wifi for smart plugs has its rough edges.

I second that. I replaced a bunch of wall switches with Leviton WiFi smart ones and would never go WiFi again. They're totally unreliable. My Meross smart plugs fair a little better but still lose connectivity now and then (got a bit better with updates).

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

#44

Post by baq »

Dalewyn wrote: post #42
ryall wrote: post #23

It's annoying that smart plugs/bulbs etc use wifi when Powerline exists

Powerline ethernet dumps an utterly horrifying amount of electrical noise into both the wiring and the surrounding area. Please don't use powerline unless you have no other solution. Note: Powerline ethernet should not be confused with Power Over Ethernet which is perfectly fine.

I'm using it on two outlets after not having enough prescience to install ethernet in my wardrobe-turned-office - got any reading materials?

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

#45

Post by 123pie123 »

i've just bought a cheap esp32 with a light sensor connected to it. then connected light sensor (ie bluetac) to my electicity meter that pulses every 1/1000 1KW/Hr, it uploads the data to google sheets which graphs the output - works great

I also have another esp32 at my elderly relatives house with a pir sensor connected to it, it's also sending the movement data to a different sheet on the google sheets site, so that i can monitor some sort of movement.

i'm i expecting google to discontinue this service at anytime - yes, but its working for now. you can write and read data from the google sheets via json via the esp32, not very inutitive but doable (and free!!)

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

#46

Post by septic-liqueur »

recursinging wrote: post #39

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!

Opendtu solar plant - care to elaborate?

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

#47

Post by septic-liqueur »

ckolkey wrote: post #21
dsab wrote: post #14

Guys what are your favourite smart plug? I need one with easy integration with grafana, not sucking, and shipment to EU country?

I'm a huge fan of https://www.shelly.com/ - they have a built in webserver and can be controlled via POST requests. No cloud needed.

I also like their products very much. I installed a few of them in my sockets. Some people argue that it's not safe to put in your sockets walls and the 16A limit is realistically lower before they can overheat and cause fire. That scared me a little bit but I think most of the reports are from bad wiring like using thin wires or not tightening the clamps enough

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

#48

Post by mindslight »

tw04 wrote: post #36
mindslight wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right up until the Home Assistant UI turns into a lagfest, the installation dies, and you can't debug why because Docker. At least that's what happened to me. And no, it wasn't RPi SD power issues. This happened on an otherwise-stable amd64 server. The Home Assistant authors' hostility towards simple native distributions is now a show stopper for me. Long term reliability is more important than quick initial setup.

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 been running Home Assistant from nixpkgs (where I am now) for several years with no hiccups, then I will certainly reconsider my opinion. But based on my experience and what I've continued to read since, it feels like trying to do that is an uphill battle. One I'm not looking to take on, especially for automation I'm relying on.

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

#49

Post by pzduniak »

recursinging wrote: post #39

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.

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

#50

Post by gog »

123pie123 wrote: post #45

i've just bought a cheap esp32 with a light sensor connected to it. then connected light sensor (ie bluetac) to my electicity meter that pulses every 1/1000 1KW/Hr, it uploads the data to google sheets which graphs the output - works great I also have another esp32 at my elderly relatives house with a pir sensor connected to it, it's also sending the movement data to a different sheet on the google sheets site, so th…

I have a Frient Zigbee device that does the same, but sends data to Home Assistant.
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