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Power Meter Threshold
needlerp 6 years ago
in Configuration & Settings
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updated by Terry (ActionTiles) (Co-Founder) 6 years ago •
3
I see in my Smarthings logs that there is a threshold for Power Meters which seems to be set at 15%. For low power devices this means that a 1w change will be over the threshold, resulting in very frequent updates. Is there anyway to change the threshold from 15% in the app / website?
Customer support service by UserEcho
Power Event resource utilization management is a major challenge for us...
Did you know that Power Events account for over 85% of all SmartThings Cloud Events! It is absolutely beyond incredible that SmartThings hasn't optimized this on their side. 😖
The implementation we have put in place until we come up with something better, is to use a sliding scale. The "percentage change (delta) required to trigger a Power value update to ActionTiles" varies according to the magnitude of the Value.
This is done via a table that we can tune. Its values are shared by everyone, however:
That means for an outlet powering a 7 watt like a CFL lamp, there are probably still too many events, as even a 1.05 watt change will exceed 15%. But at least for 100 watt outlets, a change of at least 10 watts is required. The small change on the low wattage device is still interesting to many customers. My TV varies by a few watts just by using a different brightness setting.
The scale is sliding in the order listed (instead of the reverse that folks might think is more intuitive!) because over 5000 watts is probably a HEM (Home Energy Meter) and customers using those certainly want to observe changes smaller than 10% (500 watts!). See... 2% of 5000 is 100 watts, which indicates several LED bulbs turned on.
We know this is not the optimal solution, but it actually works "pretty well" overall; Better ideas are welcome for discussion.
Thanks,
...Terry.
ok thanks, makes sense. Is there any way these thresholds could be added to app preferences so that we could customised them for a location if we wanted to change the defaults? Or even better create power ‘themes’ and the. Each power device could select which theme to use?
Ummm... You can make that a Feature Request, but please understand: "custom options" for anything are non-trivial to implement and thus have to compete with everything else for development resources.
We also would need to enforce certain minimum thresholds to ensure that the overall problem isn't any worse than now.