Having moved one of my PIR‘s in the living room to automate the lights in here too, I quickly realised there was a major flaw: when I watch the TV, I tend to move very little. This results in the lights turning off when I want them to stay on.

I had to find a better solution than waving my arms every 5 min or so to keep the lights on.

I found out Current Cost do IAMs or Individual Appliance Monitors. They look like this (I ended up with a European version with a couple of adapters to get it to work here in the UK):

Current Cost IAM

Since my Current Cost Classic monitor did not support this, I bought a 2^nd hand one that does from eBay: the EnviR:

Current Cost EnviR

The neat result is that the IAM, although not natively supported by DomotiGa (at the time of writing), is actually correctly detected since Current Cost use the same format on the serial port 🙂

It was then very simple to add an event in DomotiGa to check IF there is no motion detected on the PIR AND the power consumption of the TV is less than 20 watts (the TV uses about 12-14watts in standby), THEN I switch the light off.

SmartVISU – TV Monitor (screenshot from mobile interface)

For the record, the Current Cost returns a string, not a number, in the format ‘00000‘, so in DomotiGa I had to convert this to a number for my IF statement:

CInt(devicename_value2) < 20