Electricity Consumption / Management In Indigo

I am interested in anyone's experience with energy management in the home using Indigo.

I have been tracking and tweaking for a couple of years and I am seeing the following - would like to understand how that fits with others' experiences.

I am using on average 17Kw per day of Electricity, can't track Gas usage anymore since I was forced into using a Smart Meter (the irony is overwhelming)

On a good day we are using 15Kw on a bad 24Kw (usually laundry day).

The computer 2012 Mac Mini along with 3 Drobos, Network switch, HDHomeRun, TV Signal Amp, 24" Monitor (turned off when not in use) and a few peripherals - 2TB HDD for Time Machine, Thunderbolt/ USB 3 Hub and Dual USB 3 Data Bay.

This uses 3.5Kw a day consistently. It is running at about 20% CPU, it is a quad core i7.

This machine does a lot, it runs the Plex Media centre, with TVShows, Movies, Audio Books and Music - Plex is accessed by my kids wherever they are in the world, Channels DVR running up to 4 HD Tv channels to Apple TVs, iOS devices and Fire Sticks around the house, Indigo, and runs DuckieTV downloading all the shows we follow from around the globe.

It is the single greatest consumer of power in the house, but does a lot.

The Freezer consumes a consistent 1Kw per day and the Fridge 300W per day, they are matched large upright 'American Style' units.

The Lounge Surround system consumes about 250W per day, the TV and the Wii about 280W per day and the Fireplace a 32" Toshiba TV with an AppleTv and backlighting consumes about 320W a day runs at about 46W per hour. She who must be obeyed really likes have the 'fire' on makes the room 'cosy'. Costs less than 4p per day so acceptable.

All of which are dependant upon usage.

All in all the total usage of screens and sound in the house run less than 1.3Kw per day - about 20p a day.

All lights in the house are Philips Hue and most of those do not operate on full power and most are under motion control. If they were all on full it would 400W approx per hour.

When we go out 'Away' Mode shuts everything down, that it can.

In using zwave Indigo devices to track energy usage it has allowed me to shut devices off totally when not in use. The TVs and sound system were drawing 200W in standby (need to check that) saving approximately 50p a day in electricity.

That is about what costs to run the 2012 Mac mini with Indigo on it, so I guess Indigo pays for the running of the media server in savings.

I suppose a cheaper way would be to just unplug everything but that could get a real pain.

On a normal day I can directly account for about 30% of the electricity consumed in a day.

Would I be too retentive (assuming I have already passed that mark ) to expend effort to track down the remaining 70% ?

So the question is:-

"What is your daily electric consumption and are you using Indigo to track its usage to manage it better?"

Hello.
Actually I'm on the complaining people about the lack of power consomption management.
I tested 2 years ago a Fibaro box, and it is absolutely fabulous for this:
- You have a total value for each device, or by rooms, floors
- You have a live meter for what is used at this time, for a device, room or floor too
- You have the full history for all of this

You can, i.e., see if your children were sleeping or playing the xBox.

You can also set an alert when any washing machine, dryer or so have ended.

With Indigo, I can easily set these kinds of alert with some timers, but energy management is not really present, or I missed it.
You can have an SQL database where you could inject numbers every time you receive an updated value from a device.
But this is not so helpful, because it's not so easy to use them.

Especially, on Fibaro you have a visual graph and it's super easy and natural to read this. I'm still dreaming of this on Indigo.
But this is probably not on their roadmap.

A workaround would be to record on an SQL database, or doing the same with a curl to a website so you can store the values.
But I tried to find some tools to easily display values, I had no luck. I'm not the best with this maths, too

I would also be happy if a developer have the knowledge to do this

To go back to the topic can you save money, yes you can.
I was paying almost 300CHF a month at the beginning and 10 years later almost only 70CHF.
The kW/h was less expensive, that's true, and I had greener appliances (A+++), but still, I had more thing, a bigger TV and a better Audio system for the TV. So I was using a lot more energy there.

But a great thing is to use house modes, "Sleep", "Away", and "Present". Because, in my case, living alone and working, it's more than 16 hours a day not being at home. If you make sure everything is off, removing the standby mode on some devices (especially oven, washing machine, coffee machine, because they are often bad with standby and power off mode), you can save a lot of energy.

It's clear my old wake-up radio machine I used in the bathroom just to airplay music, with no need of the time, was using 4W. It's not a lot. But I need it only when in the bathroom, less than 1h a day anyway. Same for the Airport express there: on only when I'm here and not sleeping. And so on

Not sure it's really possible to measure this correctly with actual Indigo, but you can just make some savings.

[matt (support)]

Just wanted to chime in and say we know (and agree) that Indigo's energy management/tracking and visualization is lacking. There are the workarounds of using plugins and what-not that allow someone (with enough patience) to cobble together a solution, but this is something Indigo should natively include. So basically, +1.

+1 for me too

I am using about 5 MatPlotLib charts at the moment for visualisations.




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I use the AEOTEC sensor on my mains. I am on a “saver” rate where I get penalized for my maximum hourly usage between 3 pm and 8 pm weekdays. Otherwise low kWh cost the rest of the time. Our house has two heat pumps for HVAC. Electric hot water. Heat pump for pool heat. A hot tub. Using Indigo I monitor and control my consumption during the peak period.


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I also use the Aeotec Home Energy monitor. I created some pages to display my home energy use. You can see them here:

viewtopic.php?f=77&t=16792

The charts are from Sept but it must have been a hot Sept here in Maryland cause you can see how much my A/C is kicking in. During the winter months I'm usually in the low 20K KWhrs for energy use on a daily basis.

I also have time of day rates (hi, med, low) which you can see on the Today's Energy Use chart as the red, yellow, green color coding on the horizontal axis overlapping the time of day. One thing that I did pick up during the winter (which you really can't see on the summer chart) was the kicking in of the water heater after I took a shower in the morning before going to work. But that would tend to be in the Med (yellow) price range. So I ended up putting a 220V switch on my water heater so that I could have Indigo only turn on the water heater during the low cost time period (green).

Note that on the Yesterday's chart I must have been away during the morning with the A/C set to a high temp range since the energy use doesn't kick in till I got home in the afternoon.

Thanks all, this reminded me I need to get on with finishing my charts in Grafana which I now use rather than indigoplotd but where I did have some nice charts.

I can only explain about a third of my daily normal running use, depite having my server rack with mac mini, all AV equipment, washing maching and drier, downstairs lights and all electric underfloor monitored. I can see the spikes in use of oven and dishwasher, but I cant explain why even at night I have so much drain. I need to do some more investigation.

I tend to run approx 500W overnight and more like 1000W during the day, and then higher when oven and major appliances are running.

I’m curious as to if anyone has looked into the Hildebrand CAD device that supposedly can get live info from SMETS1 smart meters:

Product: https://shop.glowmarkt.com/products/glow-stick


API: https://docs.glowmarkt.com/GlowmarktApi ... alUser.pdf


Python library for API: https://github.com/ghostseven/Hildebran ... /README.md

I’m not actually sure if my smart meters are SMETS1 or 2 but if it’s 1 I’ll be tempted to buy one and get one for someone who wants to develop a plugin for indigo!

Interesting. I’ve avoided getting the SMETS1 ones, waiting for the 2nd gen but this is interesting.


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Count me in ....

Can’t write code but I I’ll help a way I can.

Mike

Count me in ....

Can’t write code but I I’ll help a way I can.

Mike

Oh good, you’ll pay a seasoned python developer to make a plugin and buy everyone on the forum a module?

I always knew you were a good ‘un.

I always had you as salty rather than seasoned

Urrrmmm I’ll gladly contribute towards one for the ‘team’.

Not sure how we tap into zigbee though.

I’ll be guinea pig.

Just be aware I should be starting a new contract next week that will keep me away from home a lot until Christmas, should be able to work from home then.






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Zigbee is used for communication between the device and the smart meter. The device to your network is ye ol’ wifi. At least.. that’s my understanding of it!

Also I’m very seasoned.. with salt. Lots of salt. And deep fried in batter.

Just spotted this thread, I created a new thread. My SMETS2 Hildebrand IHD/CAD arrived today and playing with the API and the MQTT service. Potential looks really good, and will be able to link to my Octopus Energy plugin to give real time actual variable cost. Watch this space, maybe configuration descriptions for MQTT or a plugin.

The IHD is actually really good, and the app gives loads of data you cannot get at any other way (even Octopus' API is historical). The IHD attaches via Zigbee to your meter and to your home wifi, then they have an MQTT service and API to get at the data.

Neil

Plugin will be published to support this in the next day or so. Watch this space.