Making a Dumb Dishwasher Smart with the Aqara Power Plug H2

[janni1122]

Hello everyone,

thanks for giving us the opportunity to test the new Aqara Power Plug H2. I wanted to share my use case.

I use the Aqara Power Plug H2 to make our “dumb” built-in dishwasher smarter.

The dishwasher itself has no status LED and only beeps 3 times when it finishes, which is very easy to miss.

Using the power monitoring inside Home Assistant, I created different states based on the current power consumption:

• Off
• Standby
• Running / Drying
• Heating

This allows me to create notifications and display a visual status on my Home Assistant dashboard depending on the current cycle state.

Hardware setup:

• Home Assistant OS + Matter running on an HP T640
• Sonoff ZBDongle-E as Thread Border Router
• Lenovo M10 Gen 3 with Kiosk Mode for the Home Assistant dashboard

This is my first Matter-over-Thread smart plug. Before that, I used the Shelly Plug S Gen 3, which uses Matter over Wi-Fi.

Compared to the Shelly, the Aqara plug is noticeably larger, but I really like that it uses Thread instead of Wi-Fi. I haven’t had any connection or stability issues so far.

I also really like the RGB LED, which is controllable via Matter. In my case it’s unfortunately hidden and therefore not very useful, but if the plug is visible it could also work great as a customizable status indicator.

Some Pictures/Screenshots:

Summary

[Raman.V]

Hello @janni1122
Thanks for sharing your way to turn your dishwasher into a smart device. It could really be useful

[AqaraOfficial]

Really nice sharing! Glad that the plug helps.

[denis.w]

Thanks for sharing your use case!
I’m using mine for the Dish Washer as well. The Dish Washer is beeping 3 times when finished, exactly like yours. Have you seen this HACS Plugin? GitHub - 3dg1luk43/ha_washdata: Home Assistant integration for smart-plug appliance monitoring: detects cycles, matches programs, estimates time remaining. Supports washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and more. · GitHub

That’s what I’m using and could be interesting for you as well

[janni1122]

Thanks for the tip, that looks really interesting!

Getting reliable appliance states only from power consumption can be a bit tricky, especially because the dishwasher changes its consumption pattern quite a lot during different phases. I would probably need to fine-tune the thresholds and timings a bit more to always get the correct matching state.

I’ll definitely give it a try

[RVSEKHAR]

Good Creative idea.