Salus Controls sell a ‘smart plug’ with model number SP600. On the face of it, it seems to be an energy monitoring plug using Zigbee ZHA1.2 and you can get it for £28 on Amazon UK or as little as £20 delivered on eBay. If it works with SmartThings it would almost seem rude not to buy one. Anyone encountered it?
https://salus-controls.com/uk/product/sp600/
Thanks,
G.
OK, I’ve answered my own query. It identifies instantly as a Thing and works happily with the Zigbee Switch Power handler, though the power consumption displayed on the tile is out by a factor of ten (showing 2.4W for a fan consuming 24W).
The manufacturer is shown as ‘Computime’, the parent company of Salus Controls. Computime is also shown for the Hive Active Plug.
It is quite a compact little thing.
How are you finding these? I’m looking to get a few plugs and these could be an inexpensive option for me.
I have three of the plugs at the moment. They seem to behave very similarly to the Hive Active Plug in that they are marketed to work with a hub, detected by SmartThings as a ‘Thing’ with the same manufacturer, work with the ‘Zigbee Switch Power’ device handler, and the power reported via the device handler is a factor of ten too low. I would imagine the Salus plugs act as Zigbee repeaters as mains powered devices generally do but I have no way of knowing.
One plug is just being used to switch on an awkwardly positioned USB charger when I realise the battery in a bluetooth speaker has gone flat. So it is off most of the time. Another one is being used to switch a fan on and off, with SmartThings acting as a timer, so gets used a bit more at the moment but only with a load of around 25W.
The third plug isn’t being used because when power is applied to it it whines in different frequencies as the LED flashes and then settles into a constant whine while the switch is ‘off’. If switched ‘on’ the whine disappears even if there isn’t a load. As my current requirements for plugs largely involve them being switched off 99% of the time in a quiet room and I also find the whine audible and distracting, I can’t really use it. I do have a replacement on the way though. If this is a one-off then fine but if it is a common issue I’d have a problem.
So my experience with them is limited to mostly standby very low power uses. I haven’t really found a reason not to buy them but equally only a particularly favourable deal has made them more attractive than others. Once you get up to about £28 a pop I think the TKB TZ68E comes in to play (Z-Wave without power monitoring) and the Hive Active Plug just about becomes an alternative.
I read the groovy code for the Zigbee Switch Power DTH earlier. It divides the power reported by the device by 10 and comments that a TODO is to make the divisor configurable.
So I thought I would clarify that the Salus and the Hive seem to be reporting values in watts but the DTH, which recognises GE switches, is currently written to support values reported in tenths of watts. I don’t know if one behaviour is more correct than the other.
Obviously creating a custom DTH would be trivial but I do like to use the standard ones if I can.
Belated correction: Zigbee devices report power in kW as an integer value and a divisor to be applied to it. The usual divisor is 10,000 to allow tenths of Watts to be reported. Dividing the reported integer value by ten thus gives a value in Watts. The Salus (and Hive) are using the usual divisor but the integer values are simply ten times too low to start with. The DTH can correct for this but isn’t actually wrong.
I updated the standard device handler to recognise the SP600, you can download it here
Its just an additional fingerprint line but now in the SmartThings app does not appear as ‘Thing’
Excellent, many thanks @Paul_Sheldon. Looks like you changed the Github URL though so I think your download link needs updating to https://github.com/paulsheldon/SmartThings-PS/blob/master/SmartThings/zigbee-switch-power.src/zigbee-switch-power.groovy ?
Cheers, yes done that now
