Coffee Pot On/Off

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

Back in the old X10 days, I had a coffee pot with a real power switch (not an always on, button press unit). I set up an appliance module, set up the coffee pot the night before, and set the CP290 controller to turn on the pot appliance module at 7:30. Easy.

Nowadays, coffee pots don’t have real switches any more. How do you guys accomplish turning on and off devices like that?

I could:

a) buy a Z-Wave enabled coffeepot
b) build some kind of solenoid hack to press the button :slight_smile:
c) get a coffee pot with a built in timer (actually, I think mine does) but that is no fun.

What to do?

Thanks, Bob

#2

Bump. No ideas?

#3

I don’t think that a coffee pot is a big automation task and if it is you already covered the ideas or ways of doing it in your first post. So I suspect your not getting many replies do to you already answering your own question.

I personally have a keurig that takes a whole 30 secs or less (literally) to pop in a Kcup or carafe to brew a single cup or tall mug. No mess to clean besides the cup either.

#4

You could try soldering Zwave relay inline with the power switch.

#5

You must have a lot of time on your hands to try and reinvent the wheel while the coffee maker surely has a timer on it.

#6

Yes, I’m thinking of doing just that. My coffee pot turns off to early and this is one of my holiday projects :slight_smile:

#7

Not sure what coffeemaker you are considering but if you really want to do this I would suggest:

Open the coffeemaker and connect wires to the “push to turn / push to turn off” button. Then use one of the isolated ZWave relays to pulse connection emulating a push of the switch.

#8

Mine does. And is how I manage it on a z-wave outlet. Push the hard switch to “On”. And I think a quick look on Amazon and you can find others - maybe not a fancy one but I think a lot of the cheap ones have a real switches.

Other than an IP enabled pot, where you could send an HTTP request, I think your old X10 method is actually what you are looking for.

BTW, I don’t know about the negative comments - this is a good use case - you might not get up at the same time daily or want to sleep in and just kick off the project when you wake (especially if you have a multi-story home and saves you a walk-down-and-walk-back-up to start the coffee maker manually)…

#9

OK, well thsnks for the comments, some more than others :-(.

I didn’t want to get too far off topic in my original post but my primary use of coffee pot automation would be asking the bedroom Dot to turn on the pot. We are retired, and our schedule varies.

And BTW, the Echo skill beta works great for me.

Bob