Smart appliances have been a thing for many years, with manufacturers trying to figure out something to hook people into the notion of wanting to buy and, presumably, pay more for. Thus far, not a lot of success.
I suspect the basic reason for this is that people don't really need it, or at least, not all the smarts.
If you think about it, all that most users probably need to know for laundry appliances is:
- Is the machine on
- How long has it to go
- Is it done
Of course, some people will want to know how much energy it's using and possibly more, but for most people, they're unlikely to care all that much.
Given my own interest in home automation and my obvious connection to the appliance industry, I keep an eye on these things and a little while ago I came across this Washdata integration for Home Assistant (HA) that really piqued my interest. So I installed it and did a little testing so you don't have to.
Any Machine Made Smart
If you run HA, this is very smart. All you need is a power monitoring plug, which for a Zigbee one is a few quid or a ZWave one for £30 or more, depending on what flavour you want.
Install the integration via HACS (Google that lot if you don't know, loads of instructions out there better than I can offer) and set it up per the instructions.
Tell it what appliance is connected to what plug.
Done.
Refresh your browser and you can add on the card as well for your dashboard and, voila, instantly a dumb appliance is made smart. Well, ish. There are caveats.
I've tested this on a dishwasher and washing machine, results are great and better than any other method to accomplish this I've seen or tried.
It gives the basic information you need: is it on, what program is running, when it will be done. You don't need any more, really.
From that, you can set up notifications from HA to ping your phone (or whatever, lights, Alexa, etc.) to tell you that the washing is on, but more importantly, I suspect, when it's complete.
Accuracy
This is a caveat. To be fair, it's really the only one I've found thus far.
This relies on the genius integration auto-detecting the program that has been put on and, it does do a decent job of that but it can take a while to work it out. You can "manually" override it and set what program you used but you have to have added it previously and set the rough time it will take.
I will stress, this isn't a dealbreaker, and most people use a handful of wash programs for their washing machine and one or two for their dishwasher so, not a big deal at all.
It's very good generally, it's not as accurate as manufacturers' apps of course, as it's not communicating directly with the machine, but a few minutes off here and there won't trouble many people. So, perfectly acceptable for most use cases.
No Need For Manufacturer Apps
And this is the beauty of this integration.
It gives you the info you need, nothing you don't or probably will rarely, if ever, use, and it's all local and private... you're not sharing your email and personal details with anyone.
The most likely thing to break is a smart plug that's easily and cheaply replaced, not a new machine, because the appliance's electronic module throws a hissy fit.
If you want a better idea of what your appliances are doing and, notificatons etc then this is the one to go for in my opinion, it's very, very good.
I have to hand it to the author, 3dg17uk43, this is a great integration that deserves some love and recognition.