I am a little bit of a stickler when it comes to energy wasting. What do you all recommend to monitor how much power all (or at least most) of my devices are using. I have seen some examples of people having a total consumption output, but just cant recall where I saw it. I would love to have something that shows what most of my devices are using and the total usage? Basically what smart devices can I get that monitors power usage of my current smarthome system. Current General setup: Smartthings, Alexa, Actiontiles, Hue.
You have many options;
- Iris/ST and some GE wall plugs
- Many Aeon devices like the HEM and a few of their smart switches/dimmers (inwall, micros, and dongles)
- Zooz devices
- GE Zigbee wall switches
- etc, etc, etc.
It all depends on the application. Some appliances may draw too much power, so pay attention to specs for the device and appliance.
If I were you, start with an Aeon HEM just to see what your house is consuming. Then start picking out appliances, and then research in this Community what others may be using for those appliances. The Search feature is your friend! There are many of us with many difference devices. There really isn’t a favorite that I have, and you’ll get varying opinions on what’s good and what works for each individual.
Once you have a plan for your appliances and devices, and you get them working the way you want, start researching what SmartApps are good for you and what your use case is. I personally use Simple Event Logger to dump data to Google Sheets.
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THANKS!!! I wish I would have known that before I bought all those GE smart switches for my lights.
I started with Aeon smart plug, than it became obsession. Today I measuring almost every device separably and whole house too. Not because my bill is high, but interesting statistic. I’m using Zooz ZEN15 for appliances, ZEN06/aeon/centralite for lamps and other devices, Aeon Smart strip for TV room, etc…
For example my old fridge in basement consumption around 160kWh, but new one almost same size is 38 kWh. New washer and Dryer less than $1 per month (2 people).
You can build great tiles with WebCore too.
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I hate it when you guys provide me with nice answers. The initial reason I decided to “smart up” my home was for efficiency *Lights off etc). I love it so much, and now I am spending like crazy because all of the automation is nice, informative, and overall just cool. Again, I appreciate all of the quick feedback and help.
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you not the first one who started with “efficiency”. it’s became a great toy for old boys… Obsessively looking what else to add and spending like crazy…
I’ve mentioned this before, but be aware that real time energy reporting and Z wave (or zigbee home automation) are not a good mix.
Z wave is intended for use cases where the individual devices only send little tiny messages not very often. Your classic light switch situation.
It’s fine if you have devices which are recording their own energy use and then you are having them report periodically, like once a day or once every few hours.
But we have had more than one community member who set up multiple monitoring devices and had them report to the hub every second or two, which absolutely hammered their networks and could result in other devices not being able to get the messages through. Indeed, it’s easy to end up with a situation where energy reporting itself is over 2/3 of your network traffic. At that point, it’s not making anything more efficient. 
So before you go crazy selecting a bunch of new devices, look at each one carefully and think about each one carefully.
If you really absolutely have to have real-time reporting of energy use, consider using a Wi-Fi device instead of a Z wave one. The other devices on the zwave network will thank you. 
Then once you get the reporting, there are a number of different community members who have created smart apps or are using third-party services to review that data in the various formats. So you might take a look at the following for more ideas:
Note that I’m not saying that there’s never a place for real time energy reporting from a Z wave device. I just want you to think long and hard about when you really need that, and to realize the impact it can have on your network. 
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What are anyone’s thoughts on whole house monitoring, like Sense?
Has anybody mentioned this to SmartThings?
Their Device Type Handler for their own and compatible Centralite smart sockets (at least the previous models) set the firmware to report on the smallest variations of Power utilization (Watts). Absolutely crazy…
Before we added a bit of throttling in our SmartApp, over 85% of all Device Events were Power messages.
What an incredible waste of SmartThings Cloud processing resources… Not to mention the impact on each Customer’s ZigBee network.
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Except for a short “audit period”, tracking utilization outlet by outlet is really a waste of time. Once high draw appliances have been identified, there’s no need to continue to collect statistics. That’s just “OCD”.
Of course, the Power Event has other uses, such as detecting when an appliance has started or stopped drawing power on its own… Like a clothes washer cycle.
Whole house monitoring could be a useful compromise. Its reports can indicate if a high draw appliance is left on while no one is home. Or periodic spikes could indicate an unexpected high draw of new appliance or TV, etc…
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That’s kind of my thought, too. Going after 5 or 10 watts seems like a waste when most of your higher draw items are major appliances.
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Checkout brutech.com. It does not tie into smart Home but it’s a real nice system to see usage by each circuit and whole house…
Jp
Footwear? Hey, but they are mobile.
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For the Appliance plug can you set a alert through core that when the energy goes down to a certain amount to push a notification?
Im not so advanced with WebCore yet, but I think everything is possible there.
However the appliances not consuming power constantly. for example dryer jumps between 2 to 700w within a cycle.
And @JDRoberts right, I need to extend reporting. Meantime have no problems, but he is right, need to free the network a bit.
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I like to add an activity switch, so I could tell Alexa to turn on laundry monitor and only then would I get real-time reporting if I wanted to know when it was off later. Stuff like that. But it just depends on each individual device as to whether you can configure it on the fly or not.
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But which network? You are sacrificing your WiFi for zwave or zigbee. Either way more devices equals more congestion.
For some complex technical reasons, wifi can handle the data streams. It’s the reason you can stream Netflix on Wi-Fi, but you’ll never stream any video or audio over zwave or zigbee home automation. Mesh networks are designed for very small messages, sent infrequently. Sometimes just a few bytes. WIFi uses either a star or tree topology and can handle a firehose worth of data, 24 hours a day. Compared to high def video, the energy reporting from a pocket socket, even if it’s 24 hours a day, won’t even be a blip.
Understood and great info. But there is also congestion on the wifi network especially 2.4 when you have Jimmy playing Xbox, daddy streaming Netflix, Sally on Snapchat and Judy on Instagram. Plus if you torrent or any large file exchange.
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