I installed one of the Emporia Smart Plugs in order to monitor the on/off state of an HVAC ventilator unit. The thought was I could periodically check the power consumption through the Vue plugin and see how many watts were been drawn to determine the operating vs standby state of the unit (the ventilator is controlled by a complex algorithm in the HVAC control system which I can't access from EISY)). My plan is to monitor how the HVAC algorithm is actually controlling the unit since I suspect it is less than optimum.

The problem I'm running into is the Current Power Consumption value in the node is in kilowatts but the ventilator only draws 170W while running and about 10W in standby. The node shows this as a decimal value (0.1763 KW operating or .0112KW standby) but this translates to value of 0 when I attempt to use the value in a program or to assign it to a variable (all variables are signed Integers in IoX). Is there anyway around this limitation? What would be really helpful is if there were another field in the Node that also displays the current power value in watts.

Thanks

Mike

Operating Mode Power

Standby Mode Power

You'll need to define a variable that has a precision (Prec column) of 4 (4 digits to the right of the decimal) to copy the value from the device into, then do these iox 'Then' statements:

Variable = Emporia Node (kw)

Variable = Variable * 1000 (This converts kW to W)

That should give you the watts value to take action in other iox conditional statements.

** Remember to use the eISY variable type of State (State Tab) with a Precision of 4, if you plan to use the variable for iox If statements

Edited Wednesday at 07:19 PM1 day by paulbates

Hah, I just received some Emporia plugs today to experiment with. This was a timely question and answer! Thanks.

4 hours ago, paulbates said:

You'll need to define a variable that has a precision (Prec column) of 4 (4 digits to the right of the decimal) to copy the value from the device into, then do these iox 'Then' statements:

Variable = Emporia Node (kw)

Variable = Variable * 1000 (This converts kW to W)

That should give you the watts value to take action in other iox conditional statements.

** Remember to use the eISY variable type of State (State Tab) with a Precision of 4, if you plan to use the variable for iox If statements

Thanks Paul. I wasn't aware that a precision could be assigned to a variable and will follow your directions to fix my problem. This new knowledge opens up a bunch of possibilities including better handling of Yolink temperature values which currently are being rounded to the nearest integer. Thanks again!

Mike