Trying to monitor a freezer for power, via Hubitat- Device Watchdog

I’ve got it working on the HE Dashboard, but I can’t seem to find a way to bring that Tile/Device/Attribute into my Sharptools Dash. Anyone have any ideas? Right now it basically just gives me an Energy Duration read out (it’s always increasing therefore I know there is power).

Are you referring to the ‘Device Watchdog’ community integration?

I haven’t personally tried that integration, but looking through the GitHub repo it looks like it creates a virtual device to hold the report status.

Have you tried authorizing that virtual device manually and then using it in a Hero Attribute tile?

Nice I didn’t see that, is there any way to poll it to see if it’s lost power easily that you can think of?

Using an external app (or even Rule Machine rule) for polling is a good approach with Hubitat’s current design.

Some of it depends a bit on what the needs / concerns are. If power to the whole house goes out, that’s a different story than power going off to an individual circuit / outlet / freezer. In that case, Hubitat is going to be offline as well, so any notifications based on device data aren’t going to be useful. :smiley:

Can you tell us more about the particular problem you are trying to solve? Is it the freezer itself that’s going out? Or perhaps the AC circuit that’s getting tripped? Or are you also concerned about the whole house losing power?

Thanks it’s just a chest freezer in the garage with a bunch of food. Sometimes a GFI trips and we don’t realize it looses power. So a notification and visual on the Panel is what I’m looking for. The way I envisioned it would just be simple, a notification of device online / offline and send pop up too. I’m not seeing anything that polls a device to see if its online like that in rules.

I was thinking you could do something like periodically check the current energy value and compare that to a previous energy value (or ideally a couple previous snapshots). In Hubitat’s Rule Machine, you could probably use a variable to store the last known value(s) for your comparison.

Since energy readings should generally fluctuate at least a small amount (especially since the precision of readings isn’t perfect), then if the values become stagnant you would know something is wrong and could do something like flip on a Virtual Switch.

Then the Virtual Switch could be displayed on your dashboard as an indicator that something is wrong when it’s on (and maybe change the tile color to Red when active to get your attention)… and could be used as a trigger in a notification.

That being said, I haven’t had this particular need before, so I haven’t spent a ton of time thinking about it. It sounds like other people in the Hubitat community may have thought about this before which is why there are solutions like Device Monitor and Device Watchdog.

Device Monitor looks like it would be great for doing the health check and sending notifications when there’s an issue. It doesn’t look like it has the ability to write back to a device for display on a dashboard though.

Device Watchdog sounds like it has the ability to periodically run the healthchecks and can turn on a device if there’s something to report. (As well as a bunch of other features like running on demand reports and other things) It sounds like you could use that ability to turn on a device to flip a Virtual Switch on that could be used for triggering notifications and/or for display in a dashboard.

I checked out the operators for something like that, but I’m not sure how that would work (comparing energy flucations) There’s “changes to” and “stays” needs a specific value and that’s the problem with selecting the value as it’s always changing.

It seems like it would be easier with Device Watchdog, but I haven’t personally tried it, so I can’t really speak to it. Reading through the Device Watchdog community post, it sounds like it can turn on a device if there’s something to report.

I don’t personally use Rule Machine, so someone else is probably better suited to answer that side of things (maybe in the HE community), but I understand that you can set variables and do basic math. I poked around in Rule Machine and it looks like you could set multiple variables, do math to determine a delta, and then use that delta (or lack of delta in this case) to determine a watchdog status. (Periodically triggered - not necessarily triggered off device events)