Lutron Caseta Dimmer integration

Adding my vote for a Lutron Caseta integration please. Have 15 Lutron Caseta switches all over the house and this would be extremely useful.

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From what I understand the device to be integrated must have energy monitoring. I don’t have any knowledge of these switches, do the have this feature?
I’m looking to replace switches and if these could be integrated then they would be on the short list. I don’t want to end up like I ha e with smart plugs and have tons of them that will never be.

I’m hoping that devices integration doesn’t require energy monitoring. That would make it a very short list indeed. :slight_smile:

Seems to be that there should be some value in being able to understand the light switches as their should be some co-temporal correlation between the light switch being turned to the on-state and one (or more) light bulbs suddenly drawing electricity. Seems like having that little bit of data would be more valuable than simply looking at the draw of the light bulbs themselves.

Definitely hoping…

Chris

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Do you have the Lutron bridge pro?

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I’ve actually talked to @RyanAtSense and @kevin1 about integration with devices that done monitor and my take from them is that is a requirement. Probably why out list is already short.
My thinking is like yours for value and I thought it could help the same with device detection just like what we have now. There are some problems that were pointed out to me with smart plugs but your idea with switches don’t carry the same issues

Three big shortcomings of most home automation vs. WiFi smartplugs with power monitoring, when providing ground truth

  1. 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)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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@kevin1 explains the reasons there and where I had been hung up originally was that I thought Sense would get the report that the switch turned and at the same time see the draw of juice in the timeline.
What made me understand my thinking would t work was if it switched on and sense saw it draw 100 watts but instead of turning the device of at the smart switch, it was turned off at the device. Sense would then not be able to correlate the two.
This all falls under answer “1.” Above. What has me wondering about the switch mentioned originally is the smart switch is the only means of on/off, so does that change things where this device would be possible?
I don’t know about it and if the requirements in 2 and 3 would be met

We’re not talking about hubs in general. This is for lutron caseta integration. Lutron’s smart bridge pro provides real time on/off status without lag iirc. Caseta is their consumer line based on same technology as their professional line of lightning controls.

None of these provide watts but these devices are hardwired in wall dimmers/switches: not likely people would remove bulbs from thier ceiling fixtures. I think it’ll provide the same info as ndi does now.

Only downside is one has to have the smart bridge pro which is only available from electrical suppliers. Their regular smart bridge doesn’ t provide local lan control (telenet).

Also these are not based on zigbee or zwave but their own proprietary radio/ protocol.

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Thanks for the overview. Seems like the Casita Pro offers the optimal technical characteristics if/when Sense develops on/off type integrations with hubs/bridges, where the feedback comes from the switch vs the end device. It still seems there exists the possibility for erroneous feedback - I had a light on a controlled switch for a month before I noticed the bulb was out.

Thanks again for highlighting differences between the pro and basic product.

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@wesman7776,
Sense just posted a Q&A video snippet that highlights how they decide which integrations they target. 3 factors:

  1. Popularity/usage of the device in the Sense community and presumably within the larger target market as well.
  2. Difficulty/complexity/cost of the integration within the Sense environment.
  3. Value of the integration back to the Sense data science team.
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I see your point. Also I realize my comparison with NDI (or network listening as they call it in the app now) is not valid as the dimmer or switch is putting out the notice and not the device consuming the power.

understood. If it’s not beneficial for detection then I have no real need for it in sense myself.

I have 6 Luton Caseta dimmer switches in my house, and one Leviton WIFI switch. All are controlling LED can retrofits, with the exception of the Leviton WIFI switch, which handles on/off scheduling duties of the porch lights that are not on motion sensors.
I do not currently have the Smart Hub Pro as I’m on Wink, but will be purchasing one along with a Hubitat.

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Lutron Caseta integration has my vote. It’s one of the best smart dimmers on the market, and I replaced almost all of my dimmers for the recessed lights, outside lights, and the switch for flood lights with them.

Sense hasn’t recognized any of the Caseta dimmers, but has discovered old vanity lights, flood lights, and any non-smart lights.

Most of the table lamps, office lamps, and nightstand lights have Ikea Tradfri bulbs and switches. Sense hasn’t recognized those, either.

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Another vote here. My house is half Hue and half Lutron Caséta dimmers, and Sense awesomely tracks the Hues (albeit it separates some of the groups for some reason), but doesn’t track any of the Lutrons.

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I’d love this. I have three Hue lights but 105 Lutron Casetas (wish I knew about RA before gong with Caseta - installed Levitron WiFi dimmers first but got frustrated with those so ripped those out…long story). I replaced all my lights with LEDs but would still be nice to know how much energy I’m burning in lighting (these $700/mo electric bills are driving me nuts).

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I want support for other smart devices as well. If nothing else just make sense see that something is happening so it can help recognize what’s going on. The energy monitoring is a bonus, but it’s easier to prepare if you know a guest is coming over Vs them just walking in the door.

The trick with any smart devices connected to Sense is that they have to be able to accurately report their electric usage.

Part of why the Hue Integration works is that the bulbs are all very well calibrated, and when dimmed, the Hue hub is reporting “actual” power consumption on each. I put actual in quotes because I don’t think there is a measurement, but just math being performed. But due to their high quality calibration, the math is accurate enough to be considered good. This is also something that Hue built into their system and Sense just had to built an integration to read the API from Hue.

The issue with something like Casetta or even Radio RA is that there isn’t any voltage monitoring going on in those systems. This means there is much more math involved to try to get power readings.

Using Home Assistant and SenseLink, I have a few dimmers on my RadioRA2 system reporting to Sense as fake TP-Link devices. The trouble is that it is not accurate. Radio RA can tell SenseLink “Kitchen Lights is at 50%”. I have told SenseLink that Kitchen Lights is a 100w device. So SenseLink tells Sense that device Kitchen Lights is using 50 watts.
For me this is close enough, but it is not accurate as there are two weak spots in this

  1. I am assuming that the power spec on the lights is correct. There could be variance in the bulbs
  2. The dimmer curve is probably not linear. So even if the bulb wattage is accurate (say 100w bulb), just because the dimmer is at 50% does not mean that the bulb is using 50w.

While 100% accuracy may not matter to some people, my assumption is that Sense isn’t going to enable something that they can’t vouch for. That is in addition to the pretty large UI build out they would need to support all the extra data the user would have to enable a system like this. They would also need to build out a lot of rules on how to handle certain conditions when data in isn’t matching what the CT’s are seeing as real power.

Maybe some day they will support more. I certainly hope they can figure something out, but I think in the short term, we can only hope that the AI gets better at certain detections, or more companies start building smart products with better built in power reporting and clean API’s that Sense can access.

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I took a different approach here.

  1. Replaced ALL lights with LEDs (no need to monitor such small consumption)
  2. Replaced all dimmers with Feit Smart switches from Costco, and installed new ones.

Main reason for 2 is primarily automation and ability to switch remotely.

I did google the Lutron Caseta smart switches but could not find any that have energy monitoring. I do have 3 Lutron fan/light controllers, but those are not smart.

What is the thinking in this thread to have Caseta Integration? Is it essentially just to know if the switch is on, and consumption can be calculated based on the dimmer/status?

If that is the case, why not extend this to many other switches as there are many on the market nowadays. Perhaps the most ‘efficient’ way is to enable such features in an API. There is one already for HomeAssistant, though not sure it does energy consumption calculation.

Thoughts ?