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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I am plotting a worse one. I have plenty of old phones sitting around, and the laundry in my apartment building has machines with weirdly inconsistent timing. I want to write a small mobile app that will transmit accelerometer data to my home Prometheus/Grafana setup so that I can put the phone on top of the machine and monitor for the end of the cycle.

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Maybe ir would be simpler to get one of those smart energy monitoring plugs and plug the machine in there. When it is done power use should drop significantly.

Excellent idea. It should be possible to configure something like Home Assistant to send a notification when the power usage goes up, and then down. This should also work for the dryer.

I'm not sure if there's smart plugs that reliably/safely work with dryers (edit: electric dryers, that is)

My Aqara smart plug says it can handle 2300 W, which should be okay for the kind of dryers sold in Europe (apparently the new ones are mostly sub 1000 W).

In the US electric dryers run on 240v which has a different plug. Not sure how they are in the EU but it's something to consider when looking for one of those plug monitors

That’s easy, the whole Europe is 230 V at 50 Hz and basically the same plug (except I think Switzerland and the UK).

I'm in AU, certified smart plugs are 240V/10A. Dryers don't need a special outlet.

I had a configuration exactly like this via HomeAssistant. Set the trigger when the power output spiked above X and sent a notification when it eventually dipped back below X for Y amount of time.

Unfortunately I could not find a plug suitable for the dryer, but for the washer it was great. I eventually decided to decommission the majority of my smart home accessories and HomeAssistant entirely.

It's not my washer and dryer or my electrical outlet.

IMO anything that needs a signup to a web service that you don't control is worse.

Personally, I'd use an esp8266 or esp32 for that.

I'd also try to find a better way of sensing whether it's running/finished, by connecting directly to the power led (you can also siphon power to run the microcontroller from the washing machine itself), or measure power usage at the plug.

It being the apartment building's laundry machines, I think my landlord would have something to say about me opening them up and connecting to the LEDs.

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