Has anyone found a good solution for monitoring the energy usage, hour-by-hour, for various TPLink smartplugs that use either the older Kasa or the newer Tapo Android apps?
I found one by "jamesbarnett91" which uses Node and Docker technology and displays graphs that can be accessed by web browser. It works fine for some firmwares of the older smart-plugs which use Kasa, but it does not see other firmwares, and it doesn't work at all for newer smart-plugs which use Tapo. Sadly jamesbarnett91 does not respond to emails![:-(]( "Sad")
The reason for wanting to see the usage as a function of time is to monitor freezers that do not report internal temperature, as a confidence test that the freezer is still working properly - eg total failure of freezer, or rising temperature because door isn't quite closed or because refrigerant has leaked out. We've had two freezers fail on us: one was an indoor freezer which started to run continuously but never got right down to -18 deg C (that was a warranty claim because it happened only a few months after we bought it - the refrigerant had leaked out); the other was a freezer in an unheated garage which failed after a few years - and yes, it *was* a Beko which is rated down to below freezing, not one of these stupid things which only work in a heated kitchen! Heating a room in order to make a freezer work seems idiotic ;-(
You'd think that by now all modern freezers would have a built-in temperature monitor which talked to a wifi network by which the temperature soulc be monitored by app or Raspberry Pi program. But in the absence of that, a cruder check on electricity usage as a fiunction of time give a guide "this freexer is permanently off or permanently on, and isn;t doing the normal on/off cycling and occasion frost-free cycling every few hours".
I'm not bothered about being able to control the on/off of a smartplug, just to be able to keep track of usage over time.
I found one by "jamesbarnett91" which uses Node and Docker technology and displays graphs that can be accessed by web browser. It works fine for some firmwares of the older smart-plugs which use Kasa, but it does not see other firmwares, and it doesn't work at all for newer smart-plugs which use Tapo. Sadly jamesbarnett91 does not respond to emails
The reason for wanting to see the usage as a function of time is to monitor freezers that do not report internal temperature, as a confidence test that the freezer is still working properly - eg total failure of freezer, or rising temperature because door isn't quite closed or because refrigerant has leaked out. We've had two freezers fail on us: one was an indoor freezer which started to run continuously but never got right down to -18 deg C (that was a warranty claim because it happened only a few months after we bought it - the refrigerant had leaked out); the other was a freezer in an unheated garage which failed after a few years - and yes, it *was* a Beko which is rated down to below freezing, not one of these stupid things which only work in a heated kitchen! Heating a room in order to make a freezer work seems idiotic ;-(
You'd think that by now all modern freezers would have a built-in temperature monitor which talked to a wifi network by which the temperature soulc be monitored by app or Raspberry Pi program. But in the absence of that, a cruder check on electricity usage as a fiunction of time give a guide "this freexer is permanently off or permanently on, and isn;t doing the normal on/off cycling and occasion frost-free cycling every few hours".
I'm not bothered about being able to control the on/off of a smartplug, just to be able to keep track of usage over time.
Statistics: Posted by martinu — Mon Nov 11, 2024 12:48 pm