Is there an app I can use to monitor my energy uses from my phone? I don’t know how this forum works. Please answer my question.
Sure, but you have to have a device installed in your house that does the energy monitoring. This could be a single device that something like a television plugs into, or it could be a device specifically for monitoring the power on a circuit in your house. Or it could be a whole house energy monitoring device like curb.
So it depends on the details of what you want to monitor. But in any case you do need a device that measures the change in energy draw physically installed in your house, and then you can have an app that reports it.
See the “Green Living” section of the Smart Setup apps for some examples:
Umm. I am thinking there should be an app that can measure energy use by simply calculating watts by time device is on for and accumulating the total consumption as KWh. Against individual things that report their instantaneous wattage and by summing across all such things.
For example the Smartthings plug reports watts. Therefore a smart app should be able to detect switching on and off and report energy consumed by that thing.
Has anyone written this SmartApp yet ?
That’s definitely “doable” and simple in concept, but I have doubts about accuracy. The current draw (watts) would have to be assumed to be constant or average since the last power report for each outlet. Power reporting Events are quite frequent, but perhaps far too frequent as some customers complain they flood the logs.
How accurate do you want the data to be?
I am thinking cheap and cheerful to just monitor those things reporting watts with the assumption that the wattage is constant over their ‘on’ periods (once warmed up). I am thinking most devices will draw a constant power during a use session e.g. a bulb, a kettle, etc.
Could be used to get an idea of how much energy devices use over a day, a week, a month given a typical usage pattern.
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Come to think of it such a Smart App could also usefully report maximum power drawn by the device.
Extending the same idea of monitoring values over time, has anyone used the temperature values for a Max-Min-Average-Actual Thermometer SmartApp ?
Can hardly believe nobody followed up.
With the watts reported from smart outlets the Hub should be able to calculate even remotely approximate energy use daily/monthly.
Currently with only watts reporting on tiles it is basically useless, unless one want to monitor power usage peaks.
I have a few Wemo insight plugs with cost/energy usage reporting I found very useful, and not totally nonsense.