Last year I wrote several articles for Residential Tech Today on Sense and have been a Sense owner ever since. I just finished writing an article for Residential Tech Today on Shelly’s (https://shelly.cloud/) product line of IoT relays; many of which include energy monitoring. Shelly relays are very small, inexpensive, and they can easily be fit inside of an electrical box. I believe the integration of these devices with Sense would be of great benefit to Sense owners.
While many of Shelly’s relays have internal power monitoring, the Shelly EM has two inputs for current transformers so it can be used to monitor the power being consumed by either two 120 VAC devices or one 240 VAC device.
Shelly’s relays with internal energy monitoring circuitry (the Shelly 1PM and Shelly 2.5 for example) could be used with devices like irrigation controllers and garage door openers that may be directly wired into an electrical box. They are also less expensive than the Shelly EM. In fact the Shelly 1PM is only $17 on Amazon.
Over the last year I have watched community posts by Sense owners who have issues with their dryers, pool pumps and some other appliances not being recognized properly, or at all, by Sense. The Kasa energy monitoring smart plugs solve many of these problems but for 240 VAC devices, or devices that are directly wired into a circuit and not plugged into an outlet, the Shelly EM, or one of the other Shelly relays with internal energy monitoring, is an ideal solution.
Shelly provides both a local REST API and a cloud API for communicating with their products. As part of the article I wrote, I developed a smart home driver that communicates with these Shelly products using the local REST API. To retrieve the power from a Shelly EM is as simple as sending the following http request:
“http://” + Device_IP + “/emeter/” + Channel + “/power”
Or, if the device is password protected
“http://” + Username + “:” + Password + “@” + Device_IP + “/emeter/” + Channel + “/power”
In the above http requests, Channel is either 1 or 2 depending on which current transformer you want to read the power from.
For those that are interested in learning more about these Shelly products you can find the article I wrote here: Shelly Offers Easy-to-Use Products for the DIY and Pro Smart Home
Hopefully others will agree that there would be great benefit to Sense owners if Sense integrated with Shelly’s line of energy monitoring relays.
Thanks