I’m slowly setting up monitoring of the solar PV / house power usage, and house/boiler temperature.
Next would be to use the data to control some appliances. Eg turn on heaters when the solar PV is generating excess power
I’m wondering if anyone has any experience of Bluetooth or WiFi connected plug sockets?
I was thinking to use Bluetooth and create an app on an old android tablet to control the Bluetooth based on data from the sensors
I’ve not seen any Bluetooth sockets, Zigbee yes.
Recently had a couple of these Wi-Fi sockets. They are basically Tuya sockets and you can convert them to any firmware you like (I use Tasmota for these) with tuya-convert.
Don’t rely too heavily on the accuracy of the consumption though.
I then control through Home-Assistant.
I’ve got a TP-Link HS110 Kasa Smart plug. https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07GWWRK1C/ It works just fine either with the app or using a shell script or python script that are available on line. No need to change the firmware. Can turn on or off and read the energy usage. I have it set via cron job to control my house heating.
I’ll send you one for the cost of the postage. IME they are utter c*&$. The Android App does not work on later versions, continual disconnects etc. I’d never recommend them.
[edit]
Plus you can get 3 of the Tuya ones for the same price!
I’ll message you, it’s worth a try as I don’t plan on using the android app or I’ll try writing my own anyway…
You need to use the Kasa App to do the initial configuration.
Just a quick comment: the original firmware in many of these IOT devices is a real security threat. Safest to reload with something like Tasmota so you can control who sees the device. (Tasmota uses a local webserver rather than an unknown one in an unknown location)
I am in the process of loading Tasmota on some older Aldi plugs (from Australia, but similar in Europe). Only pan is getting access to the programming pins: you need to solder on a header plug on flying leads, but there is enough room to leave the plug in the housing for later use.)
Good luck!
Doug
I’d agree with that. The beauty of the Tuya plugs from Amazon, is that you can flash Tasmota without any disassembly. True for the Sonoff kit as well now, but they do not do a power measuring plug (last time I looked).
Thanks. I am more interested in turning on & off devices: My pool pump for instance (but I really want a 2 way device there eventually,
because I would love to monitor the pump for both basket blockage & running dry. so differential pressure across pump, & pressure on the filter side would suffice,
but the sensors need to be Chlorine compatible, so I will need to have separation (neoprene or silicon rubber) diaphragms in the sensors. Possibly use a pi…)
Also transfer water pumps for the rain water tanks etc etc. The joys of country living.
regards, Doug
Well we seem to disagree yet again 
I’m very happy with mine. The iPhone app seems to work fine TYVM, not that I care very much. I agree the plug is totally insecure - it makes no attempt to be secure and that’s one of it’s major benefits as far as I am concerned. I have an unchanged product with full warranty that does what I want. So I thoroughly recommend it.
quite happy with zigbee sockets (- light, smoke dectors switches and more) after the initial setup of zigbee2mqtt and domoticz --they work quite stable and and had no issues since installing them… and once you got the zigbee2mqtt working there so many other devices you can connect… and if you buy more of them no need to reprogram them just plug them in and they are working in moments using domoticz
thanks all for the ideas
Looks like a TP-Link HS110 may work
also, wifiplug.co.uk has an api
or, i may just be able to use ifttt plugs.
I have a few projects in mind, most in my house where there is wifi. There’s also another potential project in future for a location with no wifi or mobile network, but i’ll get to that in future.
Both wifiplug and ifttt rely on Internet connections to a third-party server. That’s something I didn’t want to be reliant on.
Ah, do you mean actual wall sockets (e.g. Lightwave) or plug in Zigbee sockets?
I’ve got Zigbee2MQTT setup with IKEA bulbs, but I don’t find it that reliable. It does also need a system/hub setup to run them where the Wi-Fi plugs, flashed with Tasmota, are standalone and do not rely or communicate with any other ‘cloud’ service.
YMMV.
yes I have a “zigbee hub” but it integrated into my home router, energy monitor, home automation data visualization all on single device… no cloud service required it all localized … ( but I also done it on my mycroftAi or other pi devices )
I never got around to buying ikea stuff but use xiaoma, philps , heiman, sylvania, and several others brands and never had issue they worked consistently day in day out for over a year now
here picture of my internet router running openwrt os - with influxdb, chronograf kapacitor domoticz , collectd and zigbee2mqtt software installed with the zigbee stick , 500gig solidstate drive it acts as home automation server, dlna media server, NAS, energy monitor, demand shaper, zigbeehub, data and visualization server
once the “zigbee hub” other zigbee stuff integrated easily with a push of a button ( at most update zstack firmware on the zigbee sniffer device if you are using newer devices added to zigbee2mqtt ) all other wifi connected switches sensors and what not connect by specific format mqtt and automatically added to the data base… (personally I find wifi stuff very unstable compared to zigbee)
the pink light in the background is my hydroponic grow station in the corner of my office that my xiaomi zigbee switch controls lights and air pumps .
if you want the least amount of problems put the router on UPS as a momentary power glitch will some times cause zigbee sniffer to stall ( green light off - power off -push button on zigbee stick and restart green light stays on) or in the case of my router I can also install an internal lithium battery
Not sure how relevant this is, but Shelly do a power monitoring wifi widget; I have a couple, but only installed a non-power monitoring one on a pair of lights. Look for Shelly1 PM. https://shelly.cloud
What is the base hardware you are using?
I’m just exploring OpenWrt; I want a specific IOT LAN.
I have distributed all the parts of my HA onto different devices. I’ve had a bad experience of everything in one place (on one device)! A lot of it is on VMs running on an HP Micro Server, but the Zigbee stick is attached to a PiZero. However, I’m in the process of migrating my Home-Assistant setup to a new Pi4 with the rootfs on an SSD. I’m doing that the hard way - rebuilding from scratch!
It is a while since I flashed the sniffer I bought - perhaps I will update it. I don’t think I can update in place though and I’ll need to try and remember how!
Yes most of my IOT stuff is on a UPS (but not the Zigbee I have just realised). Need to think about that!
I use a bpi-r1 they were cheap $75 for everything… but I am not to sure if you can buy them anymore now you it would be the BPI-r2 to buy I was thinking about upgrading to bPI-R2 - but everything working currently so well it pointless at the moment ( plus I have about 5 unused bpi-r1 to play with so I have back up hardware form a very long time --left overs for a contract I had ) or you could buy the bpi-r64 but it cutting edge so it might not be fully supported i never investigated it yet… but another option are the opi r1 but you have limited memory so depends on what you want to do
flashing the zstack firmware is easy
yeah I like squishing everything into to one small device… and get it to work as well as possible … and squishing stuff into an openwrt system can be a challenge to say the least but one thing I can say about openwrt it is very stable and small so once you got it running you are usually problem free
just so you have an idea how well it works here my status screen even with every thing running on it 1000s mqtt topics per minute coming in and 1000s writes to the influxdb it barely impacting the router
I bought one of these to trial and used Node-RED to interrogate and control it. I like the power measurement function and use it to identify if my swimming pool filter is clogged. There is a good correlation between motor power and filter differential pressure.
