Smart Plug Questions

A few Smart Plug questions for you all. My System has recently been commissioned (Gen 2 3.6 Inverter, 5.2 Battery) and I've purchased a couple of smart plugs mainly for the energy monitoring initially.

1. Will the plug always go back to the same state when power is restored after an outage? I want to check the usage on our appliances and while oven, dishwasher etc aren't an issue I don't want the freezer defrosting overnight if the power trips for a few minutes without me noticing.
2. Is there a way to set it to 'always on' in the settings? nothing obvious when I looked and there doesn't seem to be much documentation.
3. Is there a way to export the power usage figures out to .csv? its a bit difficult to do proper comparisons from the app.

i dont know the answers but id suggest never powering something like the freezer from a smart plug. I have a bunch of them and i might plug the freezer in to monitor energy usage of a day or so but you don't want to come home some evening or worse from a few days way with a failed plug having spoiled everything in your fridge and freezer.

michaelmcgoldrick I only want to use the smart plug for a week or so to check what the average energy usage is, not as a permanent setup. I just want to verify it will come back up after a power loss.

Omission The quick & dirty way of being 'safe' is to set it to 'switch on' every couple of hours. That'll give you some cover for a power outage situation in case the smart plug doesn't have a 'remember state' option.

It’s also worth considering what the “fail state” is on any smart plug.

I see people on here mentioning they plug heaters into smart plugs, but I’ve had a smart plug fail (at a hardware level) where it’d just be on regardless of setting. Makes me wary! Although useful if a fridge.

Hi there!
Newbie question: apologies if this is obvious to regulars on the forum, but I've just started getting the datapoints for my smart plugs via the API.

I'm wondering what the units are for "power". I seem to get alternating zero or positive value for each datapoint power reading and (perhaps naively) assumed these were perhaps watt-hours consumed since last reading (as apposed to an instantaneous power use at that moment in time).

The more or less regular zero readings seem a bit fishy but as they are interspersed beween possibly valid readings I can accept that (though it seems a little strange).
Ideally I just want to get an accumulated power consumption for say a 2.5 hour period while my dishwasher is running.
Currently however if I accumulate the non-zero values within the timespan the numbers just don't seem to sum to my expected ballpark range.
Beginning to wonder if the datapoint is perhaps current rather than watts, so as you can see I'm clutching at straws.
Hopefuly one of you knowledgable folks will put me right.

Icarus I'm wondering what the units are for "power"

I don't have one of the plugs but the units for "power" are Watts (or kW or MW etc). Energy is the integrated power value over a period of time and the units of energy are Wh (or kWh or MWh etc). I assume that the blips are simply the pump or heater cutting in for a period. It'd be a shame if the plug didn't do the integration for you and provide you with a value for Energy.

Tim
Thanks Tim. I think you are right that the plug is doing the integration of watts within each timespan.
I seem to get a data point whenever the power level changes.

I've just been knocking up some code to dip into one of my plug's data between a known timespan.
This time I'm using a fan heater of known power (which won't be intermittantly sleeping like the dishwasher) and hope to draw some conclusions about the data in a more controlled manner.
I do occasionally see power readings of null (as opposed to zero) so not entirely sure how to interpret that.
Will hopefully have some answers soon.

Is it possible to switch a GivEnergy smart plug off/on via the GivEnergy API ?
Might sound like a silly question but I can't find the documented POST request needed.
Since I seem to be able to toggle the on/off state from the App on iOS, it must be possible to do remotely.

I'm happy to contact the plug on the LAN if only I had details about the required port & command syntax required.
Hopefully somebody has the details, or can point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance.

Icarus I would have assumed so since you can modify inverters and whatnot, any setting changes you push through in away mode go through immediately typically so I wouldn't have though it would be any different.

The API when you choose to create a key has loads of boxes, you could run through them and check what they say.

Icarus Do you also have a dumb energy monitor as well? You could plug one into the other to check for consistency throughout the day.

Jellybaby
I am currrently able to use the API to do a GET request to gather the smart plug datapoints showing a time & power, such as:
{
"data": [
{
"time": "2023-09-30T07:52:27Z",
"power": 12.1
},
{
"time": "2023-09-29T15:48:03Z",
"power": 7.5
}
]
}
However the API spec doesn't appear to expose a POST or PUT request to toggle the on/off state.
It is highly likely that there is a way of doing it from the cloud, but I cannot find the documentation (or GivEnergy have deliberately chosen not to expose the functionality).

Jellybaby
As it happens, I do have an in-line power monitor from EnerGenie that displays and accumulates power readings.
I've always assumed the monitor to be reliable and I have been using it in-line with a GivEnergy smart plug to correlate the results. However I do see discrepencies that I cannot account for, but I am currently refining my code to interpret the "time" and "power" readings that I get from the GivEnergy cloud REST calls.

Icarus plug on / off -it’s not exposed in the API.
The app is also certificate pinned so you can’t just snoop on it either.
Not sure why they aren’t, never asked.