Thought of a nifty ifttt (ha!) integration set up I’m going to work on this weekend: to link Sense reporting of my water heater on/off states to my ecobee thermostat.
Why? In many parts of the country, electric utilities are moving towards a demand charge scheme (especially in solar states). AZ hasn’t gone that direction yet, but aps and srp, our two largest providers, are asking our utility commission to allow the change.
I notice with some frequency (thanks to Sense!) my water heater overlapping with my heat pump - drawing extreme amounts of power (for our small home) - 10kw typically.
Enter ifttt - “if Sense says water heater is on, then tell ecobee to set a hold;” “if Sense says water heater is off, then tell ecobee to resume schedule.” That’d cut our demand in half.
This should work for a number of high use devices like our stove and dryer, but we’re still waiting on a solid ID of those devices.
That is a great idea. What also might be nice would be if you could set a limit for total wattage at which point Sense would send out an alarm that you could then use in IFTTT to turn the thermostat down. That would save you if other things were pulling high loads such as microwaves, electric ovens, hair dryers, etc…
A very good idea, I’ve been struggling to find use for the IFTTT channel since my home is pretty automated so I know already when most devices turn on and my oil burner goes on too often for me to care.
I just discovered the IFTTT integration last night in preparation for a quick demo at the local Linux user group meeting. Is the API that IFTTT uses available? One of our members uses https://home-assistant.io/ and presented on it last night. It would be valuable and probably not too difficult to integrate Sense data in that output feed and trigger things off of it as well.
From what I gather, the api hasn’t been fully opened - just for ifttt access. I agree, having more direct access would be useful. Perhaps with more user demand Sense will open up more, or at least explain why not otherwise.
I’d like to see an IFTTT trigger based on Sense custom notifications, I’ve got a use case to send an ‘OFF’ to a Wemo switch if the load has been on longer than 15 minutes. This alone over the coarse of a year will save me the cost of the Sense!!!
I would love a similar integration. I have a well pump for my house water that is currently controlled through a smart relay. I would love to be able to unpower that well pump if it has been running for x minutes because that may signal a pipe has burst in my home and the pump is running full bore filling my house with a soggy surprise. I would rather cut out the middle man (me) by receiving a sense notification and then having to toggle that pump off manually. This type of application seems exactly like what a smart home is promised to be. Self monitoring and correcting of emergencies. Just need this and a Jetsons car and I’ll be all set.
