Sensor syncing

Created: 27 September, 2023 1:50 PM

I have been building out some of the MiCasa thinking and how I could use Home Asisstant to significantly change the amount and detail of feedback that can be achieved.

With a Smart Meter installed most homes can build up a picture of how much energy your home is consuming:

So this shows that I managed to consume ~ 30 kWh in one day (broken down by hour). Immediately I can see ~ .5kWh as a base load and then higher consumption after breakfast, around lunch and in the evening.

Question? - how close can I get to finding where ALL the power goes?

I am imaging that for 20% of the effort I can find 80% of the power - stay tuned.

My initial starting point was to get WiFi enabled power monitoring plugs from Adam at localbytes. These units are the most reliable that I have come accross and also support higher wattages.

With a monitor in front of each energy consuming item we can create a picture of how much each device consumes. For example this fridge:

This specific fridge draws power periodically once the internal temperature falls below a certain threshold. The total daily consumption is consistently 0.37 kWh, so now we can now build a “daily sensor” in Home Assistant using PowerCalc - representing the fridge:

and when compared (the actual reading vs the synthetic) the overall daily power profile is close enough and we can now re-use the monitoring plug while Home Assistant can attribute the 0.37 kWh to the fridge:

This synthetic power monitoring is useful for any “annual consumption” based products, mainly refridgeration and may fluctuate based on ambient air temperature as well as contents and the number of times that it is opened and closed. For now, I will assume that they are constant.

Interestingly, this is the energy consumption of a rather older upright freezer, consuming closer to 2.5 kWh a day: