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I agree fully, I believe that my Home Assistant energy dashboard has done more for our energy consumption than any other measure. If you’re in the Netherland y
by teekert 3y ago
I agree fully, I believe that my Home Assistant energy dashboard has done more for our energy consumption than any other measure.
If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors.
The energy dashboard will give an overview of your gas and electricity usage, solar production, proportion used from grid/solar and even a home battery if present. It’s really great.
Combine it with some Aqara (zigbee but easily overloaded) or Shelly (WiFi and I find them very robust) energy monitoring power sockets and you get a very good idea of the simplest measures to take to save power. You can even add cost/kWh and M3 (gas) to the sensors in HA.
- kabes 3y agoI have the same setup. I used it to make a green light go on when we have more than 500 watt excess solar production, so my wife knows she can turn on the washing machine for free.
- teekert 3y agoThat’s very cool. Btw our dishwasher (and laundry machine) has 2 peaks at 2 kW, our dryer does 500 W continuous.
- masklinn 3y agoMakes sense since you're in the netherlands, euro appliances generally get fed cold water and warm it internally, the 2kW peaks would be when it needs to warm up the cold water. The dryer has to warm air up pretty continuously to dry the contents. At 500W I assume it's a heat pump? (IIRC condensers are usually around or above 1kW)
- teekert 3y agoAh yes, the dish and laundry washers are indeed not “hot fill”, that is hard to find here indeed. The dryer is a heat pump yes, some years ago it was the most energy efficient one we could find. (But I guess it runs longer, relying more on tumbling than heat, and wears out cloth faster).
- snickmy 3y agoI always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent. Also, I wonder why compressors in heatpumps are not multi-speed (basically energy consumption can be modulated). If you are an expert please let me know I'd love to talk more.
- masklinn 3y ago> I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent. You can find them but they'll be in the semi-professional space and above (relatively expensive high-duty). They're very rare in the consumer space because - it requires running more hot water lines / extensions, historically houses are built with lots of cold water lines but hot water lines only where required - for their heating requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically - they require an internal heater anyway as residential water circuits come nowhere near the high temperature cycles: 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45, the standard high temp cycles for washing machines are 60 and 90, and dishwasher commonly have a heavy cycle around 65 - it makes the machines more convoluted since they needs more inlets, a mixing valve, etc... - they're not really compatible with hot water tanks: you don't want your dishes or laundry to empty your shower water, plus hot water tanks are commonly electrical so there's no real gain given per the above the machines need a heater anyway
- philwelch 3y ago> for their heating requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically US uses a split phase system so you can combine two 120V circuits to get 240V. This is how most heavy appliances are wired.
- masklinn 3y agoRight but that means you need a special setup either way. In europe you just have a normal electric plug, nothing special.
- alkonaut 3y ago> If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors. If only the meters had ny power nearby or offered a 5V USB port on it so you could plug in your reader and forget it. But no. Now I'd have to keep a small Li-ion battery living in -20C since the meters are typically outside and there is never any power nearby since they are in a closed cabinet. Only the people who have indoor power meters (I know zero cases of that with detached houses, I think the power companies require the meter to be outside in a cabinet they can access without access to the house.
- swozey 3y agoI have no frame of reference but I have a feeling here (usa) it's super illegal to "tamper" with any pub utilities infrastructure. Could be wrong, though, but no usb ports. That's really cool though I wish we could do that.
- teekert 3y agoP1 port is specifically to read values and “open”. There a 10€ cable to convert it (passively) to usb. You could consider one of those clamps that measure the power through a cable from the fields around it?
- dancsi 3y agoActually, it is just serial under the hood, although electrically slightly nonstandard.
- bloomingeek 3y agoNo doubt about the tampering comment. However, my gas, water, and electric meters are all wireless and now I want to be able to monitor them for on demand usage. We shall see.
- RayyanNafees 3y agoyes