I recently posted about real-time data from your smart meter and all was good, but then thread by Robin Hawkes on Twitter caught my eye:
These devices connect to your WiFi network and allow you to switch a connected device on or off, on a schedule if you require, and also monitor power consumption. That last bit is the most important for me – knowing how much energy I’m consuming.
After researching Tasmota, an open firmware for simple home automation devices, and checking a bunch of reviews on the TP-Link Tapo P110‘s firmware, it looked like these P110s would do just what I needed – simple power monitoring for not much of an initial outlay.
LocalBytes were out of stock of both of these items when I looked, so I took the plunge and ordered one from elsewhere. Well, I ordered eight because I was feeling quite bold.
Initial setup
Trivial. Download the Android (or iOS presumably) app, plug in a device, find its wireless network and configure it to connect to your wireless network. It reboots and that’s about it.
Firmware updates can be scheduled automatically, but I don’t know whether this will switch the power off to any connected device or not. Something to check later.
Control and monitoring
The mobile app makes it quite easy to switch a device on and off, to set a schedule, and to see power consumption. But it’s a mobile app, and I want the data somewhere I can analyse it easily.
Home Assistant to the rescue! Running HA under Docker is really easy if you know Docker. I could have re-purposed one of my Raspberry Pi as I can’t get a new OpenVMS Community licence for VAX any more, but I wanted to try HA quickly to see if it fitted my needs.
Support for the P110 devices doesn’t come as standard, but there’s a community-written workaround for that. A little fiddly and not really what I’d expect, but it works.
Next steps
Oh boy, there’s a lot I want to do.
First off, I want to push the sensor data out from these devices in to an MQTT server such as Mosquitto and have Telegraf pull this data in to a time-series database so I can visualise it with Grafana.
Other things I want to do include automatically checking my Google Calendar and setting the heating to come up early when I’m doing a morning clinic, or having it come on a bit later when I’m at home that day. I want to get an inline power switch for my porch light and turn that on between dusk and sometime around midnight.