Washer and Dryer Application

Hi all,

Does anyone have any experience with connecting to appliances such as a washer and dryer? Would you share your experiences with me?

Thanks

Mine sends text messages and flashes a certain color on some of the hues.

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I’m unable to get my Samsung Washer & Dryer connected to SmartThings That’s my only real experience.

I am using the Lowes Iris wall plug for my washer. Aeon home Energy meter for my dryer. Both using smartapps CoRE to sense power and notifications.

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I have had the same problem.

Same as I and works great!

+1 monitor the power to washer and dryer on one outlet, and monitor the dryer door position, to set the notification lights elsewhere in house.

Has anyone hooked up their GE washer/dryer? Mine have the wificonnect stuff but haven’t looked into monitoring, etc yet.

Any chance you could provide further details/links on what you are doing? I have Aeon home energy monitors, but that is for my breaker panel correct? How are you using this to monitor your dryer? And how do you use an outlet to monitor your washing machine?

Thanks!

Monitor the wattage when the dryer or washer is on, idle and off. This will help you determine how to create your Virtual Switches and CoRE Pistons.

Here’s my seemingly complex setup but works absolutely perfect!

Create Virtual Switch for both Washer and Dryer
Using CoRE, create the following Basic Piston in Expert Mode.
Now when the washer/dryer is running, the switch in on and visa-versa

Next, create some cool Piston like the following:

Setting them up as Virtual Switches makes it easy to follow the logic vs using variables like the more advanced Piston but using variables will allow you not to get false alarms.

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I’m using a single Aeon HEM to monitor both the washer and the dryer, one on each leg. I have CoRE monitor the custom DTH (which is an energy monitor with switch and 2-buttons, thanks @Mike_Maxwell) that sends a pushed event when energy goes above a threshold and sends a held event when it falls below the threshold. It also has switch capabilities that turns on when either the washer or the dryer starts.

This sends a notification on start and stop of the washer or dryer.

Matt,

I used mine to monitor both the washer and dryer with one HEM. Basically, a single leg of the HEM can monitor an individual energy draw. The same way you would connect each leg to a separate trunk going to your breaker panel, is how I hooked it up.

For my washer, I actually installed one clamp inside a standard junction box. I notched the drywall underneath the outlet cover as a cable conduit, allowing the outlet cover to be installed as flush as it previously was.

For my dryer, since the cable splits into individual insulated wires near the dryer terminals, I simply used the other HEM clamp around the dryer hot wire.

The DTH that I use monitors each clamp separately, and extends the functionality by registering the HEM as 2 buttons and a switch in addition to and energy monitor. This allows for each monitoring of the state via events sent by the custom DTH.

What outlet did you buy that shows you the power usage through it? And how can one use an Aeon energy monitor to monitor a dryer?

I use this to monitor the power to the washer. When the Power rises above 5W, Washer is on. When the power drops below 5W, I get a text message saying cycle complete.

I couldn’t do the same with Dryer as my dryer uses a 4-prong 220V connection. I tried using a Samsung Multi Sensor to detect vibration like they suggest on their website but I had no joy. Apparently my dryer doesn’t shake enough (who ever complained about that?).

So what I do is I monitor the temperature of the multisensor and compare it to a temperature sensor in the adjacent room. They are almost always 0-1 degrees difference if the dryer is not running or hasn’t recently run. But a few minutes after the dryer starts to run, the delta in temperature rises to 2+ degrees, this is a signal that my dryer is running (hot). I have a smart app that I wrote that measures the temperature of the dryer and watches for the temperature to stop rising and then fall. As soon as it starts falling, I get a text that the dryer is finished. My experience has been this is usually 5-10 minutes after the actual completion of the cycle. It’s not perfect, but it works (FYI, I use the same smart app on my Dishwasher for similar reasons).

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Thank you very much for the link Jarrett. I think that unit will work great for the washing machine. I’ll grab one. I have the same issue with a dryer as you would. So using a mutli-sensor temperature monitor works well for you?

Also, anyone know anything about this unit?

I’ve emailed them and asked about SmartThings integration.

Iris Smart Plugs

Bought 10 of them for $12.99 each when Lowes had them marked down.

Dang! I wish they were still that price!

@Matthew_Freestone With the caveat that this is the first ever smart app I’ve written for SmartThings and that I’ve only been using it two weeks, yes it is generally working for me.

I’m traveling through tomorrow but when I’m back home, I’m happy to share the code with you to try out if you like. It’s probably rank amateur coding and not bullet-proof (for instance, I do get some false “start” messages which I still need to sort out), but having a few other people try it out may help me improve its robustness as well as add some new features going forward.

One thought, instead of using a contact sensor for temperature, if I used a momentary button like this one that reports temperature, I could use it to manually “start” the cycle watch and that would eliminate the false alarms (I just ordered one so I will code it up as an option this weekend)

Ok, that sounds great!