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.
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.
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).
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
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.
I took a different approach here.
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 ?
The Hue integration is a good example of home automation that reports actual power usage per bulb and fits into the Sense scheme, where each bulb or bank of bulbs looks like any other Sense device in the UI. If other home automation either had the same power calculation capabilities or even allowed a user to add their own power info, plus had a productized API that was similar, I’m sure integration would be straightforward.
I’m a new Sense user. I have two smart lighting technologies in my house, Hue and Caseta. Lutron’s Caseta hardware is rock solid and replaced other more poorly made hardware. I have well over 20 devices. Even if Sense can only detect when a switch or dimmer is turned on, if it lets me calibrate the load on each switch myself that would be a benefit for me. Caseta was a major investment in the house and they aren’t going anywhere.
I have Hue in my primary residence and Caseta in my getaway place. The challenge with Caseta is that it doesn’t provide power info for the bulbs/devices, like the Hue API does. You probably could use something like Home Assistant together with the Sense and Lutron integrations to do that “calibration” that you are discussing.
I’d love Caseta power metering just as much as everyone else, but this isn’t just an API limitation from Lutron. The Caseta hardware itself doesn’t have the necessary capability to track current usage, so I don’t see how this could be integrated in the way Hue does.
Would still be cool to have on/off capability and use that to help train the ML models for those that have a Caseta Pro hub.
Yeah, I have no expectation that Caseta could report the power usage; but it could report on/off and dimming level. Just like you can now manually add devices to your Always On, it would be cool if you could add devices that come out of the Other grouping, conditioned (and scaled) by the manually-entered power numbers.
Using it to train the AI model would be cool too, but would be much harder to program and get to work correctly. They’ve previously said that manually training devices doesn’t work well for their models, and I don’t know that has changed, so I wouldn’t expect it.
That said, I also moved out of my house with the Caseta dimmers, so I don’t really care about this as much any more. Though I may some day replace all the dimmers with this house with more modern ones; among other reasons, the ones in my new house burn a fair amount of always-on power (I estimated maybe 80W across the whole house), and aren’t compatible with LED bulbs.
I have all my Caseta lights and fans broadcasting over “emulated_kasa” via home assistant and its sweet. Mapped the dimmer switches to max light load so it’s close enough. Works great
This is a very creative workaround!! Nice thinking. Seeing all those bubbles makes me happy and jealous, haha
Does the kasa emulation have the ability to report dynamic power use from plugs that actually report energy use? I’ve got Home Assistant running for another purpose but am considering installing the kasa integration along with some zigbee or zwave plugs with energy monitoring.
Pretty sure it can, but you’ll have to customize the lookup/mapper function for your particular devices.
Yes. I have a “Koogeek” HomeKit/Wi-Fi energy monitoring outlet and it reports to Home Assistant, which you can then add to “emulated kasa”. Also I have mapped my Lutron Caseta light switch dimmers to report an “accurate” power usage for their current setting.
light.kitchen_main_lights:
name: Kitchen Lights
power: >-
{{ (float(state_attr('light.kitchen_main_lights', 'brightness')) / 255) * 32 }}This sounds like a clever workaround. Can you please share a few steps on how to replicate this setup?
The first step is to set up Home Assistant in your house for more general Home Automation, then load the Sense integration, plus Casa integration, or whatever other devices you want to help monitor the power.
Second step would be to do the mapping between brightness (or whatever) and power usage for the devices you want to connect to Sense in the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file. Then make sure you are seeing reasonable power info within Home Assistant.
Third step would be to link the data from that device, or set of devices, to the emulated_Kasa device using the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file.