Smartthings Outlet Sends Notification Every Minute Or Two While On?

Is it normal for the Smartthings outlet to fill the activity feed with notifications that are happening every minute or two?

What particular notifications?

Frequent Power usage (Watts) are a known “issue”…

Yes, it keeps telling me what the power usage is. Would another brand of outlet not do this?

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Fixing the Device Type Handler should be sufficient.

But there are a lot of Z-Wave Outlets that do not have any power reporting built in.

This. Unfortunately the stock ST devicetype is configured to report very granular power fluctuations (I think a tenth of a watt change) and with a very low time threshold (every second if the power draw changes by that tenth of a watt).

A custom device handler would be an easy fix at the cost of local control for hub v2 users. Simply making those events hidden from the events list would work or changing the report thresholds. If you don’t mind going custom, post the devicetype this outlet is using (there have been several iterations of the outlet hardware and devicetypes), and I can recommend the necessary changes

It’s in the Template list and/or in the SmartThings Public GitHub repo.

Thanks. Last time I looked there were several versions, but it looks like just one with power reporting.

The line:

sendEvent(name: “power”, value: powerValue)

Would just become:

sendEvent(name: “power”, value: powerValue, displayed: false)

That’s the easiest way. The tiles will still update and you can still use SmartApps that rely on the power reports; but they won’t clutter the recent events list.

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Do a Pull Request on the official DTH?

Thank you, this seems to have worked great.

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That’s a good idea. I should probably make it a preference option. Some people might want the power info, although I can’t think of a good reason why and they can always access non-displayed events in the IDE.

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where can I find the custom device handler ?

Answered over here: Reducing power reporting noise in a device type