Load Shedding/Control

Other Devices & Integrations Lighting & Load Control
1

Fibaro posted this picture on their Facebook page this morning:

which got me thinking about ways to use Vera to shed high loads during emergencies, etc. So I thought I would start a thread on the question to see if we could exchange ideas about:

  • How to accomplish load shedding/control for heavy load items (stoves, air conditioners, heaters, etc.,
  • Sensing situations where load shedding is called for
  • Safety issues involved
  • How to use Vera in this task, controlling contactors, sensing load situations, emergencies, etc.,

I was doing some early research and came across a number of 24v (coil voltage) contactors, latching relays, etc.

Open discussion anyone?

2

Could you do it with Vera - maybe. Is that the right place to do it - not clear. To me this sort of falls into the same “critical system” area as fire and security alarms - things for which the bulk of people on this board feel is best handled by a dedicated system, potentially bridged to Vera.

I assume your functional requirements are to:

  • detect power outage conditions
  • based on length of power outages, turn selected circuits/devices off according to a programmable list and specified order
  • turn them back on in another specified order
  • have notifications throughout all the above

Is your use case for residential - have you looked at computer-controlled transfer switches like this:

3

bobk named one use case for load shedding, the other is during high demands and the local utility company is calling for it to avoid brown/black outs. I know for my office if we offer to load shed during high demand times the local utility gives us a discounted rate. But we have two diesel generators on premise and we simply disconnect ourselves from the grid for awhile. We get the rate discount and it helps us exercise the generators for when we have a real blackout.

In theory you could use Vera to do all the things bobk outlined, but you’d want to test the hell out of it. Knowing that any system change (adding a plugin, a change in code somewhere, etc) could cause Vera to become unstable/unpredictable, I’m not so sure I’d want to use it for this particular use case.