Power/Energy Monitoring?

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. :scream:

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. :wink:

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. :sunglasses:

@tgauchat

3 Likes