Washing Machine Cycle Notifications (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Washing Machine Cycle Notifications (2020)

malachisoord.com

27 pointsmooreds13 comments

Watched a video on this several months ago [0]. I find the idea of inferring some stuff about the washing machine and dryer from a smart plug, but keeping the unit itself dumb is pretty good compromise. I mostly want a notification when the washer finishes in case I don't hear the beep, but I don't need to add yet another thing that needs access to wifi, talks to the cloud or otherwise messes with my privacy.

Bonus points: CV to watch for the done LED on the washer or audio processing to hear the done noise on the dryer, but both of those have broader privacy/computational load implications that make them seem less than worth it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOI3T9IVe0

I typically set a timer as reminder to switch the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer by voice, e.g “ok Google set a 1 hour timer”. Or I set a timer in my phone.

You must have a lot of free time if you’re engineering anything more complicated than that!

Many newer washers and dryers have sensors, and will adjust runtime on the fly. In my house, we joke about "washing time units", which are most definitely not minutes, and sometimes go up as the wash progresses.

> CV to watch for the done LED

If you're ok obscuring the LED, you can probably tape any sort of light sensitive component on top and use that to sense the done indicator without modifying the machine.

Photodiode, phototransitor, whatevs, should be easy enough to hook it up to a microcontroller and do your bidding. You could even make a replacement done indicator. You might need to tune it carefully depending on how much light bleeds between the different indicators.

If you're willing to modify the machine, you can probably rewire the done led to be more useful.

If you already have home assistant or a similar system in place, it's very easy to do using a power consumption sensing smart plug. I'm using a Tasmota flashed Sonoff plug and read its "_energy_power" sensor and automate based on that. Nothing leaves my house in that scenario.

Home Assistant is like lego it all sticks together.

My solution is pretty much the same except instead of telegram I have a remotely controllable accent LED in my office and it uses similar logic to detect washing machine power use. More than four watts means red accent LED, less than 4 watts means green LED. LED off means the presence detection thinks I am not in the room (also it flashes red when my exterior doors or garage door open, essentially logical "AND" with the washer wattage, but trying not to confuse issues)

I am not familiar with the Gosund SP111 in the article I use a Zooz-ZEN15 it can easily handle a 15 amp circuits worth of power although its measurement is "squirrely" below two or three watts drawn. Thankfully my clothes washer is economically inefficient enough to draw at least 6 watts to light all those indicator LEDs?

My bulb is an older Aeotec zwave bulb. It can be quite bright with several watts but it can also be stable when dim. Also presence detection is a thing so its off completely when I'm not in the office.

You're probably asking yourself how many times I've accidentally shut off the ZEN15 power (its a switch AND a monitor) and my solution is Home Assistant makes it very easy to command a "power on" every hour, so even if I or wife or kids accidentally shut it off by hitting the little button it'll get turned on again very soon anyway. Technically I am being lazy by commanding a power on every hour, it would make more sense to set up a trigger that sends a "on" immediately anytime it sees an "off" state, but infinite spare time, etc... I could check the logs but this may have never been shut off so putting much effort into fixing may be misplaced.

The next level up is ignoring the instantaneous power output and monitoring the total energy counter. That works really well for sump pumps and fridges where the instant use doesn't really matter but something's off if the total energy counter doesn't increment over a time interval.

I'm using HA to, but for p.v. and I'm honestly far less enthusiast for various reasons... Leaving aside consideration about the TERRIBLE YAML mess of HA and it's terribly handled storage or it's distribution model where the sole realistic usage option is via pip wrapping it the real issue came form available hw on sale.

Measuring it's nice, but does not help in practical ways the home users, despite the geek satisfaction of seeing nice dashboards. What's help it's the ability to maximize self consumption for those who have PV or minimize costs for those with energy prices that vary in various ways all day/year long. That means having appliances that can run or shut down automatically. We actually have essentially NOTHING on sale for that.

I've managed with a mix of Shelly Pro (to be wired) and Raspi zero + WaveShare ModBUS TCP adapters to automate a bit my home but the maximum I've practically achieved is piloting hot sanitary water and heating a bit, effective, but limited. To drive washing machine, dishwasher etc I need essentially to open them, re-wire their control panel to a GPIO board like Raspi and drive it from HA, something a bit absurd since demand a manual reverse engineer of the machine (not that complicated, but not nice) who need to be redo from scratch anytime I change machine since different model even of the same brand have different switches...

I really enjoy these projects but it is sad that most of this basic stuff isn't already built into all new appliances. How much extra would it cost on $300 to add a small power usage sensor and a basic readout to understand how much energy is being used on different cycles?

Also, with modern detergents, you can use much cooler washes than previously but I don't really know. If I have a white shirt with a stain, will it work on 40 deg with some oxi stain-remover or will it still need 60? These kinds of things are mainly ingrained from using similar washing machines for decades so I always e.g. put colours on 40 and whites on 60. If the machine could somehow help me with this (like the Bosch which can control dosing) then maybe we could save a tonne of wasted energy and make our clothes last longer.

I don't want them to build it into the appliance and if they do I won't use it unless it 100% doesn't use a manufacturer specific cloud because of all the downsides that come with it.

I need to get more serious about my washing machine cycle notifications. I have an ultrasonic water flow sensor on my water main and a whole-house power meter, but need to put a power meter on the washer/drier circuits directly to really sense them going off.

For now, I just have a button I press when I start a load and it starts a complex timer that waits an hour and then starts giving voice notifications through the whole house (mimic3 TTS + snapcast) saying "The Laundry has been finished for 1.5 hours", etc every 30 mins until I clear it.

Home Assistant is truly awesome though, gotta say.

This is a nice project! I did something similar a few years back to get notifications when the clothes dryer finished running in the basement of a multistory building: https://github.com/mccollam/UDLDryerSensor

I’ve done essentially the same thing for several of our heavy load circuits around the house using an Iotawatt to relay data to InfluxDb. From there it’s pretty easy to write a script that will query the current load and toggle a switch in HomeBridge for automation. Pretty fun stuff.

This could be handy if you have a big house. Personally I can hear whether the washer is running on my way to the bathroom so I just transfer the laundry on my way back.

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