softener-monitoring

Monitor power usage for my water softener, alert when it cycles. This is mostly notes and tinkering.

Components

Hardware:

• Water Softener
• TP-Link HS110 WiFi Smart Plug

Software:

• InfluxDB: Holds power consumption time series data.
• https://github.com/plasticrake/tplink-smarthome-api: Lets us scrape energy metrics from the HS110 plug. The included Kasa app doesn't provide enough granularity to identify when a water softener cycles. We need more granularity and flexibility in reporting.
• Flask: Run a small API that can receive InfluxDB alerts and send email notifications via SendGrid.

Deploying

• Run InfluxDB on its own, set up:
  • Org and bucket
  • Access token with permission to write to a bucket
• Create config and secret entries referenced in docker-compose.yml
• docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yml softener
• In InfluxDB, set up:
  • Monitoring dashboard
  • Threshold and Deadman Checks
  • Notification endpoint targeting the Flask endpoint
  • Alerting rules based on power metrics:
    • Ok (Idle): 700mW - 1W
    • Info (Running): >1W
    • Warn (Low Draw): <700mW
    • Crit: From deadman check