Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana

ounapuu.ee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 190 posts

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

#71

Post by stavros »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #68
stavros wrote: 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.

> How do you know it will continue to function as a circuit breaker and isn't just a piece of wire inside?

I don't care. I connected my previous breaker after it.

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

#72

Post by wannacboatmovie »

stavros wrote: post #71
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How do you know it will continue to function as a circuit breaker and isn't just a piece of wire inside? I don't care. I connected my previous breaker after it.

Why not just use a current transformer? (Clamp over wire type) It's much safer.

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

#73

Post by nikisweeting »

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 love these ATORCH ones on Amazon, they have a screen with a bunch of useful details, super stable wifi connection, over-voltage/current/power protection, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGSYJQK6/

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

#74

Post by aksss »

stavros wrote: post #19

I got a Zigbee power breaker and hooked it up so all my flat's power goes through it, and then made an e-ink display to show my power consumption: https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

I think the aliexpress link for the display is busted (as they do).

A natural integration would be with Home Assistant. I’m not sure if the Earu breaker has an OOTB integration with HA yet, beyond doing something like Zigbee2MQTT and configuring entities for readings. It’s a good pattern though - integrate meter with your automation hub, let the automation hub push the images to displays, for meter and everything else.

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

#75

Post by stavros »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #72
stavros wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know it will continue to function as a circuit breaker and isn't just a piece of wire inside? I don't care. I connected my previous breaker after it.

Why not just use a current transformer? (Clamp over wire type) It's much safer.

Do you know of a Zigbee one? That's also a good option.

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

#76

Post by aksss »

Surprised there’s not more mention of Shelly monitors in these comments. They’re great for whole house (service entrance) and circuit power monitoring. Pretty open integration, OOTB integration with HA.

I think it makes more sense to use “dumb” OTS circuit breakers in your house and augment with add-on monitor than combining the capabilities into a tightly-coupled single device.

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

#77

Post by wannacboatmovie »

stavros wrote: post #75
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use a current transformer? (Clamp over wire type) It's much safer.

Do you know of a Zigbee one? That's also a good option.

Some options at the $10 price point on AliExpress, though I cannot recommend one, maybe another reader can. CTs are the generally accepted way to do this and don't have to modify mains wiring. Could also build your own; CTs are inexpensive.

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

#79

Post by kasey_junk »

I nerded out on this a few years ago and ended up buying a not well known device called a rainforest automation eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z114-eagle-200-2/). Its a pretty straight forward little linux device that reads your smart meter (after being enrolled via your utility). It exposes an xml api that I bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).

I also bridge my utility (ComEd's) pricing feed to prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). Between those 2 I get pretty good whole home utilization and pricing info graphed into Prometheus (and thus into Grafana).

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

#80

Post by ssl-3 »

rkagerer wrote: post #43
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).

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 (a common-enough tale regardless of connectivity choice), they seem to Just Work.

It's all semi-random brands of devices, bought over time.

I'm not doing anything particularly fancy with the network itself: It's just a couple of hardwired dual-band Mikrotik access points, with one upstairs at the back of the house and one downstairs at the front of the house (perhaps non-obviously, on non-overlapping channels). A Pi 4 with OpenWRT quietly does the packet-slinging.

Like in many other places, the 2.4GHz band is approximately ruined where I live these days. It's noisy and slow. But it all works well enough to reliably toggle a relay on or off, at least.

Am I just lucky? Are others just unlucky? Or is there an actual pattern here?

Post reply on HN