Is It Dry Yet?
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I picked up a simple Zigbee vibration sensor for less than 20$, taped it on top of the washer/dryer, and connected it to HomeAssistant using Zigbee2MQTT. After creating two automations to detect start/stop based on continuous vibrations over a few minutes, I had the notifications working the exact same way.
Between small production sizes and the relay there are probably cheaper DIY solutions. OP is just using a smart plug, so no real electronics involved.
Or maybe I have this all wrong.
That said, it's probably worth a try, because it's likely that internally the drier's control circuits are only tapping one leg, and you might be able to read that, and it might change reliably enough to trigger an alert.
Usually, you'd use a vibration sensor for this job however. You can also use a thermal sensor on the exhaust air, combined with a time delay (because they run cooldown/dewrinkle cycles), and you're good to go.
I can find very few smart plugs that specifically advertise the ability to handle inductive loads, which makes a ton of sense of course, since I think that winds up needing relatively expensive MOSFETs and circuit design more advanced than I can really understand to be robust. I think the best recommendation I've seen is to simply not use smart plugs for inductive loads at all, and instead use other methods to either measure current or implement switching.
I'm a bit afraid to use most any of these smart plugs. I have a couple Zigbee ones that seem to work fine but I am only trusting them with relatively small resistive loads for now since it feels dicey to put anything serious on them.
The problem with switching an inductive load using a small relay (like the ones in smart plugs) is that the magnetic field collapses in the motor as soon as the relay contacts open. This causes a very large flyback voltage to build across the contacts as the relay is still in the process of opening (mechanically driven by a spring) and so you get arcing which damages the contacts and results in carbon deposits (with higher resistance than clean metal).
In this application the smart plug is already switched on (contacts closed) when the dryer is started and the smart plug doesn't switch off while the dryer is running. Instead, the smart plug's only job is to monitor the power usage of the dryer and send a notification when it drops below 10W.
Or use smart switches made for geysers. Something like the sonoff pow3 can handle up to 5.5kW. Since it is just a relay inside I am pretty sure it can handle inductive loads fine.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/blue-print-to-work-wit...
First gas dryer I could find at best buy: LG 7.4 cu ft (beefy boy) needs 11.5 amps. I’d be shocked if you can’t find a 15A smart plug.
Super simple, cannot be fooled if your values for XYZ are set appropriately.
Yeah, I keep meaning to look at clamp style measurement. That doesn't give you control, of course, but I'm mostly interested in finding out how much power larger appliances are actually using (my dryer is pure electric).
I’m in Canada (as I said at the top of this thread). Are you in the US? Perhaps it’s different there.
You probably have an “American” dishwasher like a GE or Whirlpool. If you upgrade to a “European” one like a Bosch or Miele, you’ll need to wire up a socket in an adjacent cabinet and plug it in, or buy their ~$50 junction box.
The Europeans like to move with their appliances instead of leave them in place. It’s another reason for their big kitchen appliances like fridges being smaller: so it’s easier to move and it will fit wherever you move next.
That said, in either case it should not be hard to single out an L or N wire and clamp it to detect flowing current. However a vibration or acoustic sensor is probably easier and cheaper.
Not affiliated, just a happy customer of:
https://cloudfree.shop/product/cloudfree-smart-plug-runs-tas...
I won some smart plugs at a work event, and I'm not a smart home guy so I brought them home and figured out how to set them up. They required a vendor specific smartphone app. I was less than impressed. I wouldn't be able to set up any automations because this thing had to dial home to some shitty vendor cloud lock-in thing.
I looked into how to load open firmware onto the smart switches, and I discovered I'd basically have to destroy the plastic shell of the device to get access to the circuit board, desolder the wifi control module and solder in a new module that was compatible with Tasmota, which is the standard open source firmware for these devices.
What was much easier was to buy Sonoff S31 smart switches because they are able to be disassembled without cutting and grinding the shell away. Then I reprogrammed them using a 3d printed clip with pogo pins - flashing the Tasmota firmware so that I could do whatever I wanted with them.
Easier still would be to buy smart plugs with Tasmota pre-flashed.
Is it a kids thing?
45 minutes is more than enough time to get thoroughly engrossed in a myriad of activities, so, easy to forget, and not all drier cycles are predictable. Timed dry is, but, anything smarter than that isn't (and most driers still in service are smarter).
I want to build something like this that reminds me many times that I need to switch the laundry.
A load of jeans will take longer than a polyester shirt load.
My dryer beeps, but, it's in the garage, so, impossible to hear.
You're right though, this way is more fun.
This solution is fully automated.
May be a better way of doing it but off hand you can do it with 2 scenes.
Scene 1. If power consumption > 100w for 5 minutes turn scene 2 on.
Scene 2. If power draw less than 5w for more than a minute. send notification to phone. Turn off scene 2.
It's really nice because the channel name is the password, there's no API key or sign up needed.
I like Zrok a lot for true remote access, it seems to do something similar to what tailscale is doing there, but it's powered by some decentralized tech that seems to leave open the possibility of having the tunnel endpoint in a phone app so it still works on isolated LANs.
Of course this is all theoretical, since in practice I keep my personal everyday practical tech a bit more off the shelf, I just put a YoLink vibration sensor on the dryer.
So now I put it on timed dry, and that means I can just start a 60 minute timer on my watch.
This is a similar example JUST to get a water leak notification from a user-friendly device (by user friendly means no crappy proprietary protocols and services imposed, local as a first class usage etc) https://kfx.fr/posts/shellyfloodandha/ and just to use such automation to automatically close a motorized valve witch actually just provide 4 power wires (ground, phase on "close", phase on "open" and "neutral) is another wall of YAML.
Essentially 99% of commercial IoT seems to be designed just to impress illiterate people with colors and so on, not much differently than older merchants on "savage peoples" selling colored glass like gold, and without any ideas about a real practical usage and integration of useful features.
Personally about most kitchen appliance I cry for maximizing p.v. self-consumption, since it's the sole technically sound way to use p.v., for instance ovens, dishwasher, washing machines, dryers can be "left ready to run" for a significant amount of time, all we need to maximize self-consumption is coordinate their power usage: ovens start to consume for a certain amount of time, than just keep hot with short time heating, washing machines tend to heat one or two time maximum for a certain (variable) amount of time, dishwasher tend to heat more times, but all can delay a bit their power loads, if they offer a cheap ModBUS or a less cheap but not so expensive MQTT card AS AN OPTION to be plugged behind the machine or even a kind of "smart plug" that actually just a local powerline device communicating to the internal electronics, coordinate their run from HA would be simple. No one seems to have though about such usage. Water heaters? Similarly, even most modern heat pump water heaters take into account just delaying consumption looking at grid energy price, no real integration with p.v., cars? Even worse: 99% of BEV support DC direct charging, actually most p.v. inverters supporting a battery support 400V batteries, the very same voltage of most cars nowadays, so why the hell not offer a simple home charge socket DC-to-DC to avoid double conversion DC-AC-DC with significant loss in the process? AFAIK only one vendor do so, but NOT integrated with any P.V. they just use "fast charging" as a bidirection bridge to offer V2H for cars do not support such usage (like MOST cars on sale).
The subtext with which to understand both of our comments is the clearly recognizable generative image from an LLM.
For some reason it is completely acceptable on these forums to trash talk people who use LLMs, or even more problematic, to disparagingly accuse someone of sounding like an LLM.
I assume because it is based on the idea that using an LLM is low effort which is why I mentioned different kinds of low effort images that are not often criticized.
So an alternative to making the tumble dryer "smarter" can be to simply not use it for most of the time, thereby cutting the loss caused by "dumb" dryers.
The engineering part that's missing is related to re-introducing and improving the many awesome laundry line systems that used to be available.
Where I grew up if you left the clothes out (but covered with inclement weather), depending on season, they would either dry perfectly or get a funky (awful) smell to them. I wish we had a drier back then, it would have made my teenage years less embarrassing.
I think I’ve seen the kinds of indoor drying lines you are perhaps referring to, but I don’t know how compatible they are with Northern Europe.
I'm Polish and we've always had a dryer at home, no idea how my mum would have gone through that pile of loundry she always did otherwise. So YMMV.
And the problem in the UK is that relative humidy is so high you literally start getting mold inside your house if you just use an airing dryer, as most people do, a lot of houses have that characteristic "musky" smell because they are just too damp. In poland the air is a lot dryer(especially in winter!) so you don't get this problem.
1. We don't expect solids to evaporate, because it's not something we notice often (though if you think about the fact that a few inches of snow can disappear in a couple of days while the temperature remains below zero Celsius, you suddenly realize that you do observe it if you live in a cold climate)
2. We're so accustomed to using heat to speed the evaporation of water. So we might assume that removing large amounts of heat energy will "stop" evaporation. Or at least cause it to slow so much that air drying becomes impractical.
But ice does, indeed evaporate (to be accurate, it sublimates). My question is how temperature affects the speed of evaporation at low temperatures. How long do you need to leave your wet clothes hanging below freezing before they are dry?
https://phys.org/news/2018-10-sublimation-solid-ice-quickly-...
I might try this out on the deck next season but I don't assume ice is just going to sublimate away because it's literally outside all winter and doesn't go anywhere.
Although most people have a freezer that needs to be deiced occasionally.
Particularly, if they have an ice cube tray in their freezer... and, somehow, the ice cubes in the tray slowly shrink.
And when they do freeze it's not like cloth encased in ice, it's more like the clothes still look and feel dry - they just hold their shape :) If you put them at room temperature they finish drying within minutes.
The loss that TFA and smart dryers are trying to cut is time spent on laundry. Having lived both with and without a tumble dryer, I'm very skeptical that there's a laundry line system out there that is less time consuming than even a dumb tumble dryer.
If there is one, I'd love a link!
You put your clothes there, and the next day they are dry.
Other common solution is collapsible drying racks on your balcony: https://images.morele.net/i256/12998234_0_i256.jpg
Or just clothes lines (but usually people have some backup in case it rains).
I've never seen people use powered dryers for clothes. And we get our share of rain, and in the winter it gets to -20C sometimes.
If you have working ventillation you're fine either way. If not - you're not. In fact I'd expect worse problems if you evaporate that same water quicker, because there's less time for it to escape outside.
In contrast, my grandmother lives in a village with such incredible rainy seasons, that this has been a pain point as perpetual as the rain itself. For a few months in summer, the air is so humid that even unused clothes have trouble stay dry. Condensation appears on the wall, and nothing ever dries, no matter where you hang them; indoors, outdoors, doesn't make a difference. Sometimes, they have no dry clothes for weeks during summer.
For some items like wool underwear and t-shirts I hang inside because sun bleaching can be a problem.
I live in a desert, and my current place has a not-tiny yard, so I'm curious about this. Anyone got examples or pictures of laundry line systems they really like?
I've seen many great things in photos where laundry lines are strapped out between windows and across streets "ad hoc". But most of them were in photos. I think the "pulley" that carries the line and the line itself seem to be more durable than what my local building market sells... I can only get nylon lines and small pulleys, so I'm not happy with the projects I've done so far. The best lines I've found are the ones with metal wire inside.. the ones without metal in them break very quickly.
One that I would really like to have is a strong, durable multi-line rack that sits below a window. If possible, I'd like to be able to expand and contract it.
There's also a lot of ideas shared online for creative indoor solutions.
In general, Pinterest is the place to go.
Indoors: https://www.houzz.com.au/magazine/designs-for-living-10-dryi...
Regarding crinkly clothes: generally if you hang up a wet shirt to dry, it gets less crinkly than in a tumble drier. That's an old tip for reducing ironing efforts :)
Regarding "hard" towels etc: This one is really difficult, especially terrycloth and similar material that's supposed to be very soft can seem hard after air drying. You can try to add vinegar as a softener if your water is hard, I find that makes a good improvement. And you can generally rub clothes soft - I tried folding towels and give it a good rubbing, works well to soften them up. I would also remark that after using a soft towel once and drying it, the terrycloth also becomes hard :)
If you're even lazier you can get a combo washer/dryer. Not quite as effective as a separate dryer but it's nice to have dirty clothes go in and clean, dry clothes come out without a middle step.
The smart plug idea is slick. I like the idea of decoupling the smart from the appliance. I'd much rather all my appliances be dumb.
In the US, you'd have to get a 240 volt smart plug. Are there any reputable ones?
For the laundry use case, I just set an alarm on my phone though...
For the 75% that use electric. 25% use gas with 120V motor/control.
If you consume 100watts, reset a countdown timer. So as home assistant polls the outlet, it should keep resetting the timer. If the timer expires, then notify that the dryer is done.
But I suppose the countdown approach would still trigger the same thing. I suppose if I didn't really want the extra alerts I should be monitoring the duration of power consumption and exclude the ones that are of a shorter duration.
I might try the countdown approach for something different and see what results I get. Thanks for the idea!
I was thinking of doing something similar to what you are dong but was trying to think of how to do it without the custom virtual device.
They don't even cost that much compared to ones that aren't connected.
And it ended up being a fun project for me ^.^