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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

ZigBee could definitely do it but as someone with a lot of smart wall plugs (I have a total of ~40 ZigBee devices in my house) that data is just not really useful because it's just a drop in the bucket compared to cooling/heating/hot water.

One thing that would be more useful and that I really want to get is one of those amp meter for the distribution panel to see my power consumption in realtime: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007038134809.html but I didn't get around to it yet.

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I have two of these(1) Emporia Vue2 units in my home, one in each load center. I have them flashed with espHome and integrated into HomeAssistant.

I really love that they give whole home power usage, as well as up to 16 individual circuit usage details. And with espHome into HA, all local control with no cloud dependency.

(1) https://shop.emporiaenergy.com/collections/in-panel-energy-m...

This is what I've done; I use a Z-Wave power meter on my electricity meter for whole-home, then some individual ones for my desk/3dp/rack, the ~50 ZigBee devices I have are mostly bulbs or sensors (I also have another ~40-50 Z-Wave devices) and the majority are things that use very little power; the usage stats from those things is a rounding error.

For bulbs and sensors, the power usage isn't useful for automation either, you can use other data they provide (turn off lights when no one is around, do stuff when doors open/close).

For whole-home though, it can be useful to see if the power is higher than you'd expect; if it's not dinner time and we're using 2kW+ for more than a few minutes, send a notification in case someone left an electric heater or an iron or something on.

I'd appreciate smart plugs with bidirectional communication, as real-time power use report + ability to switch the plug = poor man's way to turn most devices into IoT devices for local control. It would help in particular with ones operated by IR remotes, which deliver commands but don't get feedback on their state; you could observe device's power consumption to infer the current mode of operation, providing a bidirectional control abstraction in e.g. Home Assistant.

Not sure if I am understanding correctly but getting power consumption and being able to turn the switch on and off is definitely available in even cheap ZigBee switches: https://www.amazon.ca/THIRDREALITY-Real-time-Monitoring-Comp... (~12$ each).

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