Notify/Trigger Scene If Power Is Less Than 1 Watt For 1 Hour

Hi,

I am trying to monitor a freezer via power usage. Is there a good way to get notified if the freezer uses less than 1 watt for say an hour or so?

Thanks for your help.

[quote=“ndstate, post:1, topic:200624”]Hi,

I am trying to monitor a freezer via power usage. Is there a good way to get notified if the freezer uses less than 1 watt for say an hour or so?

Thanks for your help.[/quote]
Yes. I have logic that does that using the venerable countdown timer plug-in and three scenes. I would suggest, however, looking at the Reactor plug-in from @rigpapa. It’s designed to make it easy to solve these kinds of problems. There is a subforum for the plug-in on this forum and the plug-in is in the App store on Vera.

[quote=“ndstate, post:1, topic:200624”]Hi,

I am trying to monitor a freezer via power usage. Is there a good way to get notified if the freezer uses less than 1 watt for say an hour or so?

Thanks for your help.[/quote]

I don’t think this kind of logic is fully solid. A freezer would be running/stopping/running/… to maintain its internal temperature. So its quite possible that the freezer does not consume any energy for several hours. Now off course 1W it not much, so even when the compressor is not running it might consume 1W all the time…

Go for the Reactor plugin, there you can easily do this. I’ve done the same to detect if my TV is playing.

Thanks for the replies, I will dig into Reactor. It has an always on external led that I assumed would use at least 1 watt… it doesn’t. So I will have to try it a different way with Reactor.

I have an old (1976) freezer with a simple bimetallic thermostat. The freezer is either drawing ~160W (ON) or 0W (OFF). Simply pick some low wattage, e.g.10W, as your OFF threshold. You will need to monitor the freezer to see how long it stays off before cycling back on—this will vary will room temperature, of course, but for mine it always turns back on within ~45 minutes. I set the timeout for 1 hour. If the freezer turns back on within the hour, the timer is reset. If the timer expires, I get a notification. Reactor will be able to do this easily.