Three big shortcomings of most home automation vs. WiFi smartplugs with power monitoring, when providing ground truth
- just because a smart switch is on, doesn’t mean current is flowing. The device under control could be off, thermostatic, or burnt out. And bad ground truth is worse than no ground truth. The only class of smart devices immune from this problem are those that report their status back to the hub (I.e. Hue smart bulbs)
- 4 Bytes / second of well time-correlated power data is much richer ground truth data than loosely time-correlated 1 bit (on / off switch event) data every so often.
- The relatively small number of power sensing smarthome hub-oriented devices probably can’t communicate with enough frequency or tight
enough temporal resolution with the Sense monitor to match the current integrations due to bandwidth limitations of Z-wave/Zigbee
Would love to see smarthome hub integrations for better learning, but I wanted to point out some of the additional challenges in making that work similarly.