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Discuss & Vote

Scale or change units value of Power Meter

Orange Bucket 6 years ago in Things & Capabilities • updated by Terry (ActionTiles) (Co-Founder) 6 years ago • 1

My Power Meter tiles currently displays power usage in watts, optionally with decimals. That's fine and dandy but for display purposes I'd find it useful to be able to apply a multiplier to the value supplied by SmartThings so I can use my own units. Those units might be kilowatts, ergs per second, horsepower, BTU per hour or (much) more likely my own user defined units which may differ for each device. With or without a multiplier it would be useful to be able to override the footer text for the tile.


There is also an ulterior motive, as using two of the less expensive available smart plugs in the UK (Hive Active Plug and Salus SP600) with the Zigbee Switch Power DTH to avoid using a custom DTH results in a reported power usage that is a factor of ten too low for whatever reason. So my choice of user defined units would 'correct' that. Again if I can't scale the value being able to have e.g. 'Power / 10' as the footer text would be a useful visual aid for me.


I guess parts of this may have the potential to fall foul of 'Works With SmartThings' in some way, but it is worth asking.

Discuss & Vote
Terry (ActionTiles) (Co-Founder) 6 years ago

The ability to translate or customize enumerated Attribute Values is an existing recent Feature Request. Please add your votes:  https://support.actiontiles.com/communities/12/topics/4280-map-attribute-value-to-custom-value-in-tile-footer

As for adding a scaling factor... That's a similar concept, but a little bit further out of our scope.


i.e., ActionTiles exists to present Things' standard Attribute Values in a customizable layout - not transformed into a different numeric value entirely.

We prefer to consider where functionality should optimally exist, per the SmartThings architecture / paradigm: We don't want the SmartThings App and ActionTiles to show radically different data - we want the value to be the same that would be exposed and used by other SmartApps, etc.


  1. If your DTH isn't outputting desired scaling, ideally you should be using a different or customized DTH.
  2. If can't or don't want to mess with the default DTH, then you could spawn a Virtual Device (Virtual Power Meter...) and use WebCoRE or another SmartApp to update its Attribute whenever the real device is updated. This won't get around the displayed units issue, because ActionTiles is currently limited to specific standard Capability definitions for now (Compatible SmartThings Capabilities (Device Type abstractions)) and so your Virtual DTH must claim and match one of those.

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