In this post I will explain how I hooked up our normal washing machine to provide some power usage insights, such as sending notifications that include the cycle time and power consumption.

I’m using Home Assistant and leveraging Node-Red installed via an addon to provide the automation layer. By leveraging the addon it provides seem-less integration to query entities and trigger services.

For this setup I used a Gosund SP111 but you could any power sensing smart plug that you can feed the data into Home Assistant.

Setting up the sensors

I flashed the plug with Tasmota allowing me to push the data via MQTT to be consumed by Home Assistant. You can do this automatically via the MQTT auto discovery flag but I like to manually set things up to allow me to learn as I go.

- name : washing_machine_energy platform : mqtt state_topic : " tele/socket-10/SENSOR" value_template : ' ' unit_of_measurement : kWh - name : washing_machine_power platform : mqtt state_topic : " tele/socket-10/SENSOR" value_template : ' ' unit_of_measurement : W

Since the power usage changes during the wash cycle I added an additional template based sensor that would signal if the device was on or off based of the power draw is > 5w and has been on for more than 60 seconds.

- platform : template sensors : washing_machine_state : friendly_name : Washing Machine Status value_template : >- {% if (states('sensor.washing_machine_power')|int >= 5 and (as_timestamp(now()) - as_timestamp(states.sensor.desk_power.last_changed)) / 60 | int > 3) %} on {% else %} off {% endif %}

You could probably achieve similar behaviour in Node-Red but I wanted to keep this logic in Home Assistant for now.

Notification Side

For the notification side I opted to use the Telegram integration since it’s easy to work with, free, doesn’t involve me installing another app as I use it daily, and is pretty rich for other capabilities such as sending videos and images.

Setting up Node-Red

If you’ve never worked with Node-Red I highly recommend you read their official documentation or watch a few starter videos such as:

For this automation you will need to setup 3 nodes.

State node

This is the input node that is used to kick things off. It matches the the sensor.washing_machine_state entity and is setup as a bool sensor to output only on state cange.

Function node

This is where the real logic happens. Computing the energy usage and the elapsed cycle time.

const haStates = global . get ( ' homeassistant ' ). homeAssistant . states ; const entity = haStates [ ' sensor.washing_machine_energy ' ]; if ( msg . payload ) { const data = { state : entity . state , startTime : Date . now (), }; context . set ( ' savedState ' , data ); } else { const data = context . get ( ' savedState ' ); if ( data === undefined ) { return ; } const energy = parseFloat ( Math . abs ( entity . state - data . state )). toFixed ( 2 ); const duration = millisToMinutesAndSeconds ( Date . now () - data . startTime ); const payload = { energy : energy , duration : duration , } msg . payload = payload ; return msg ; } function millisToMinutesAndSeconds ( millis ) { let minutes = Math . floor ( millis / 60000 ); let seconds = (( millis % 60000 ) / 1000 ). toFixed ( 0 ); return minutes + " : " + ( seconds < 10 ? ' 0 ' : '' ) + seconds ; }

Service node

Finally once the computation has been calculated and the payload has been emitted to the notifier service.

The Data for the service call consisted of this JSON structure: