A few unrelated projects has postponed tackling the plumbing part of putting the other two water meters in service. Meanwhile, I have been tweaking the behaviors and such for a couple other bits.

The heatlamp for the water system has turned itself on every day. It was indeed chilly for several days, so it wasn’t inconceivable that maybe it reached my low temperature trigger of 36F in the garage, but a couple of days over 50 that still had the light on every morning made me start actually checking.

I used one of the Emporia switches (cloud controlled; none of my Zigbee switches monitor power and that is a whole ‘nother conversation) so that I could monitor the power consumption of the outlet and thus detect a burned out bulb. The log showed some curious stuff though. This thing loses contact all the time.

If you look carefully, you can see the pattern. It becomes unavailable, then exactly one minute later, it comes back, appearing to change state, but I think it just renews it’s current state. That goes on as far back as you care to scroll.

However, at 6:00, something turns the switch on, then this same pattern just keeps repeating with the new status.

I checked the automation on the water temperature sensor and the outside temperature sensor, even though I had not automation for *this* switch for outside temp.

Finally, I found it. In the Emporia app on my phone, there was a schedule to turn the switch on at 6AM every day. I had originally deployed this plug out in the workshop for the horse trough and I wanted to ensure it was not accidentally turned off and left off. I disabled the scheduled.

The light was on the next morning.

I deleted the schedule and it finally stopped. 🙂

In related news, I have two CloudFree P2 plugs. These are plugs preconfigured with Tasmota and it turns out they have very extensive power monitoring capabilities and no cloud dependency. I have removed the other Emporia plug that (for reasons I don’t recall) was also deployed for the horse trough and put a CloudFree P2 in it’s place.

As you can see, it gathers a lot of power statistics. Currently, there is a recirculating pump that is running basically all the time. It is important, but not particularly critical. However, I am about to redeploy the deicing heater and if it goes out, particularly during freezing conditions, I need to know about it. The automation I have in place currently will notify me if it draws less that 10 watts for more than 10 minutes which would currently only tell me if something disconnected the pump, which one of the horses used to do on occasion. The pump draws 108W pretty much continuously. The heater pulls 1200-ish watts when heating and about about 1/2W when idle, presumably to work it’s thermostat. I presume I could script something to separate a pump failure from a heater failure, even though they run on the same outlet. I have more than once thought about separating them. At the very least, I could run them on two switch plugs.

The bad news is that I only ordered two of the CloudFree P2 units and one of them turned out to be DOA. I have contacted CloudFree about it (no reply, but it has not even been 24 hours yet) but I also ordered several more. I will have other things to control and/or monitor and especially at $10 apiece (Black Friday 2022 pricing apparently; back to $13 as I write this, but still a great price), they are a great little bit of kit.

I had some difficulties excluding and including my old Jasco ZWave switches to my new controller, but all appears forgiven now. I pulled the air gap power plug thingy on them and that seemed to properly reset them enough for them to be happy.

I dug into the wiring for a couple of 3 way switches in the kitchen. They are wired in the 2nd least favorite way for conversion to the Jasco switches I have had on hand for several years, but with some minor rewiring, I can make it work. I will post that separately one day. The one I really want to change out is a set of lights in our sunroom that is tecnically a 4 way, with one switch in the living room that is almost never touched, but is sure to complicate things, wiring-wise. I really want to deploy my Zooz scene controller where the kitchen located switch for that sunroom light is and use it to control several things.

The barn/workshop automation has to be all Zigbee or Wifi. I don’t think I can reasonably extend the ZWave network out there. That isn’t expected to be a problem; I have good Zigbee and excellent WiFI out there. I have a couple of Zigbee light switches, but I’m not sure how they handle 3 way connections as yet. I may need to deploy some wireless toggle switches for those remotes.

I put a new battery in the Ecolink tilting garage door sensor that I have had since Vera was new, along with putting a ZWave repeater in what I hope was a suitable place to extend the network into the garage, but the switch was last heard from on 16 days ago as I write this. I may try again now that the two light switches are working and helping to provide a little more network stability.

Before I discovered ESPHome, I had gotten a Zooz Multirelay with the idea of using it for the water filter project. As it turns out, a couple of it’s features are not particularly well suited to the needs of the water filter, but they are entirely suitable for automating garage door openers.