Critical notification if overall consumption of home appliances exceeds a threshold

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As we have seen in several articles of this newsletter, Home Assistant can help us in monitoring electrical consumptions of any power socket we have at home.

We only need to use a sensor ables to get the electrical consumptions, install and configure it in order to get it managed by Home Assistant and that's it!

To do that I'm using the Aeotec nano switch that's perfectly integrated in Home Assistant thanks to the Z-Wave integration.

Having one Aeotec nano switch sensor for each high energy consuming appliance can help us know if we are exceeding the maximum power threshold of our home meter.

Today I want to introduce how to be notified in case the overall consumption of the following appliances is exceeding 3kW:

• washing machine
• dishwasher
• oven
• iron

Hardware configuration

1. Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5+. It's a Z-Wave gateway to build up and manage your Z-Wave network.
2. Aeotec nano switch.?It's a Z-Wave device that allows you to control any switch as well as socket from anywhere. For this specific use case, I've used the device with energy reading feature (ZW116). In case you need to control two different sockets at time, please refer to the Aeotec dual nano switch (ZW132?with energy reading). You need a nano switch for each household appliance. As soon as the device has been added to your Z-Wave network, it will expose the following entity related to the current consumption:?sensor.yoursensor_electric_consumption_w.

Software configuration

1. Home Assistant. I'm currently running version?2022.12.5.
2. Z-Wave JS integration?configured in?Home Assistant. This integration allows you to control all the Z-Wave devices installed in your network via?Home Assistant.

Home Assistant code (yaml) / procedure

The following video will show you how to configure:

• an input number helper to be used for the threshold
• the helper Combine the state of several sensors to sum the current consumptions of the appliances listed above
• an automation to send a critical notification if the threshold is exceeded

This is the notification I've got:

And... this is the code behind the automation:

alias: Android notification - Maximum power home meter ENEL exceeding
description: Android notification - Maximum power home meter ENEL exceeding
trigger:
? - platform: template
? ? value_template: >-
? ? ? {{states('sensor.consumo_elettrodomestici') |float >
? ? ? states('input_number.max_soglia_contatore_enel') |float }}
condition: []
action:
? - service: notify.mobile_app_pocox3nfc
? ? data:
? ? ? message: >-
? ? ? ? {{
? ? ? ? states[trigger.entity_id.split(".")[0]][trigger.entity_id.split(".")[1]].name
? ? ? ? }} is {{states[trigger.entity_id].state}} W
? ? ? data:
? ? ? ? ttl: 0
? ? ? ? priority: high
? ? ? ? channel: alarm_stream_max
mode: single        

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