Since getting a small little cabin in the local mountains I have had on the to do list pulling out one of my currently unused Raspbery Pi’s and setting it up and lots of other yet to be determined things for gathering temperature data inside and outside the house. Then last week when chatting with my neighbor Nieves about how soon it would be cold in the mountains as WINTER IS COMING she mentioned that we probably need to get a smart plug to turn on the heater before we came up, as otherwise by the time we left at the end of the weekend the house would just be getting livable. I said yea that was a good idea and was thinking about my Raspberry Pi and having to get WireGuard on it as well so I could get onto the local network to control things… and later in the day I thought, well before doing all that, let me see what is out there. Oh boy was I in for a treat!
I quickly saw that there were lots of different options available but what captured my attention was a 14€ Tapo Smart Plug that just is so non intrusive and has power usage monitoring that I could not pass it up:
It arrived and the setup was so easy via the Tapo Android app that in minutes I was controlling the plug and able to see what it was electricity it was consuming at that very moment, or see historical graphs!!!! A few years ago I almost bought a Kill A Watt for 40 something euros and here in addition to electricity consumption I could control it from anywhere in the world!!!!
I quickly found my electric bill and not so quickly (electric bills in Spain are very confusing) figured out what I was paying for electricity: 0.135914€ per kWh. I found an online calculator to help me with the heaving lifting to figure out how much the heater would cost to run:
Wow. Ok. I now have a bit more appreciation for the heater’s consumption, but quite honestly before I had this hard data I would have thought it would cost an arm and a leg to leave it running 24 hours straight but 5€ was not an arm and a leg. Not only that I now have a monthly counter of what I am spending just on the heater. OH MAN I NEED LOTS MORE OF THESE THINGS!
But before I get more smart plugs, I wanted to tackle my obsession for weather temperature data and now I had a valid excuse: If I was going to turn on the heater from Madrid, it would be good to control that it was in fact starting to get warmer in the house. So I found another very perfect Tapo device:
and ordered two of them (one for next to the heater and another for outside (warning: the T315 should not be used outside)).
Once again setup could not have been easier. These guys require a smart hub as they use Sub-1G wireless protocol so that their two AA batteries last longer so I got the T100. First I had to add it to my Tapo app and then added the two sensors. Oh man I am in heaven:
The finishing of the sensors is so high quality I just can’t imagine what the kludge I would have had if I had done this myself. I am going to continue playing with these ones before ordering more, but the most likely thing is every room in the house will end up with one.
I do still want to make sure I can interface with them if for some reason the Tapo service one day disappears, but that is for another day, for now I am just enjoying how painless, easy, and useful this has been.
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).