I recently embarked on a fun and slightly quirky project to monitor our office electric kettle using a Shelly Energy Plug integrated with Home Assistant. The goal was to track when the kettle was in use and estimate the amount of water inside based on its energy consumption. Here’s how it went down!
The kettle in question is a 5L model that draws about 800W when heating from cold and around 100W when maintaining temperature. I set up a Home Assistant instance to monitor the power usage and created an icon on the dashboard to indicate the kettle’s status—whether it was heating, keeping warm, hot, or off. The idea was to avoid finding an underfilled kettle when I got downstairs for tea!
The challenge came in estimating the water level. I calculated that heating 1L of water from 20°C to 100°C requires approximately 0.091kWh. Using this, I tried to measure the energy consumed during each heating cycle to estimate the water volume. For example, heating about 5.1L from 18°C to 100°C consistently used around 470Wh, which aligned well with the theoretical calculation. This made me think it was possible to estimate the water level by analyzing the energy data.
However, I hit a snag when trying to get Home Assistant to perform these calculations automatically. I ended up scripting a solution to turn the kettle on and measure the energy consumption during heating. While this worked, I’m still exploring how to automate the water level estimation within Home Assistant. If anyone has tips or ideas on how to implement this, I’d love to hear them!
This project has been a great learning experience, even if it’s a bit over-the-top. It taught me a lot about energy monitoring and automation. Plus, it’s been a fun way to engage with the community and share my findings. If you’re looking for a creative way to monitor your appliances, I highly recommend exploring energy monitoring setups—they can be both informative and entertaining!
Happy tinkering! 