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Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 10:28 am
by johnf
I just ordered a wireless security system, as I wanted something that would just work out of the box, leaving me just the HA part to tinker with. One of the things that comes with it is a plugin module to turn on a lamp when the alarm goes off. I would like to be able to notify Indigo when that outlet comes on so that I could turn on every light in the house instead of just a lamp. Is that doable?

Re: Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 10:35 am
by Colorado4Wheeler
Is the lamp module a supported Indigo device? If not then it could be tricky to try to know what a generic lamp module is doing when it's not tied to Indigo in any way. If it is supported by Indigo then you can just do a simple trigger:

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Screen Shot 2018-02-09 at 9.33.42 AM.png (70.52 KiB) Viewed 1308 times

Re: Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 10:45 am
by Colorado4Wheeler
Alternatively, if the lamp module is unsupported but you have an energy monitoring outlet (i.e., supported Zwave) that indigo can talk to you can use this trigger:

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Screen Shot 2018-02-09 at 9.44.13 AM.png (72.67 KiB) Viewed 1304 times

Re: Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 10:47 am
by johnpolasek
There are several plug in Z-wave power monitors that are compatible with Indigo; If you always leave the device on, you would be able to tell when the lamp begins drawing power... There used to be an insteon device (Imeter Solo) that was a pure power monitoring device, but it looks like that has been discontinued.... You might want to use a trigger of Greater than say 10 watts rather than has any change; a lot of the monitors could fluctuate between 1 to 4 watts due to the current required to run the radio receiver from the alarm system.

Re: Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 1:27 pm
by johnf
Yes, the appliance/lamp module works with the alarm system, not with Indigo. I use Z Wave, so any solution would need to work with that. It sounds like the way to go is to plug it into an energy monitor. I could then go ahead and plug a lamp into it so that there is additional load when it powers on. I figured that was really all of the interaction that I actually needed between the systems, just to know when the alarm was going off. Maybe I could use some type of sensor to detect the sound of the alarm as well.

Re: Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 2:01 pm
by johnpolasek
If you're into playing with hardware, yet another possibility would be to put a 110V relay on the lamp module instead of or in addition to the lamp and let the relay contacts go to the GIO on a raspberry Pi that's set up to use Karl's PiBeacon plugin... You could throw that together for probably less than $30 in parts and it would give you a for sure trigger to Indigo.

Re: Alert on powered outlet

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 4:16 pm
by jay (support)
I just bought one of these to replace an iMeter solo. Only been running for about a week but seems to be working nicely.