Yesterday I wrote about managing a WeMo switch with Alexa, and today I wanted to write about how you can export energy usage data from a WeMo Insight switch to Excel. The WeMo Insight switch generates a lot of detailed information that is really helpful if you are trying to figure out how much power certain devices or devices in your home or office are using.
Even though the app data is great, you can export much more detailed 45 days of data to Excel, and then do whatever you want with it: create charts and graphs showing which days are using the most energy, how many hours the device is. is idle or on, etc.
In this post, I will walk you through the process of exporting data, and then explain how the data is organized in an Excel spreadsheet. I will also show you how to quickly create a chart showing your energy consumption.
Export energy data from WeMo
By default, the WeMo app provides you with high-level energy usage data such as how long the device has been on today and on average per day, estimated monthly cost, and average and current energy consumption.
That’s enough for most people, but if you’re a data fanatic and love using Excel, you’ll love the fact that you can export so much additional data for your own analysis. To do this, we need to click the “Change” button in the upper right corner of the WeMo application. The switches will change the way they are displayed and you should click on the WeMo Insight switch.
On the next screen, you will see several options at the bottom, but we are interested in exporting data. I will explain some of the other parameters later as they can affect what data is exported.
Finally, on the last screen, enter your email address and click Export Now. You will be immediately sent an email with a CSV attachment containing all device data from the last 45 days.
Optionally, you can also set up scheduled exports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Since the data is only retained for 45 days, it is recommended that you export the data once a month to avoid losing data if you forget to export it manually.
I also suggest using a monthly frequency because the way it works now is ALL data from the last 45 days is sent every time you export. It doesn’t look like a data dump or something. In the end, you will also have to create a master worksheet and copy and paste data from new tables to old ones if you want a single table to contain data for more than 45 days.
In the email, the filename will be “Export for devicename ”. Since this is a CSV file, you can open it in Google Sheets, Excel, or a host of other programs if you like. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll be using Excel. Now let’s look at the table.
At the top, you will get some basic information like the date and time of the last update for this energy report, the device name, some MAC ID, the signal strength of the WeMo device, and then the energy cost per kWh and the threshold (W). These last two values ??can be changed in the application on the screen where you clicked Export Data. So the estimated monthly cost WeMo gives you is based on this 0.11 cost per kWh, but your electricity costs may differ.
The best way to find out is to look at your electricity bill and divide the total electricity by the total kWh used. You should only look at the electrical part of the bill, not gas. Here’s an example of my electricity bill to clarify:
So here I would take $ 267.46 and divide by 1830 kWh and that gives me about 0.146, which is 14.6 cents per kWh as cost. So now I go into the WeMo app and change it from .111 to .146 and that gives me a very accurate estimate of my monthly cost for this device.
In addition, you can adjust the threshold value, which basically determines whether the device is on or in standby mode. By default, this value is set to 8 W. If the device consumes less, it is considered in standby mode. I’m not an electrical engineer and I’m not entirely sure what is the best for this, so I just left it at 8W.
Below is the daily usage summary section, which breaks down the main statistics by day. You can see the running time, standby time, average power consumption per day and daily value. If you want to see the total power consumed per day, just create a formula and add Power Consumption (On) and Power Consumption (Standby) for each row. Finally, at the bottom, you will see a breakdown by usage for half an hour.
Depending on how many days you have data in, there can be quite a few rows of data. It will also allow you to create beautiful graphs to see your energy consumption over time. In my opinion, the best chart for viewing this type of data is the XY Scatter chart. If you select two columns of data including the headers, click Insert – Chart and select XY Scatter, you get something like this: < / p>
As you can see, my refrigerator uses about 0.006 kWh when not in operation and jumps to 0.012 kWh when cooled. It also alternates between these states day and night. Use on other devices will likely result in a different kind of diagram.
Note that resetting WeMo is a good idea if you decide to move it to a different location to track data on another device. If you don’t, you will receive data from two different devices, making it useless unless you remember the exact day you moved the switch.
Overall, the WeMo Insight toggle is well worth the money if you’re a data lover. In my opinion, you only really need one of them to track different devices. If you have a couple of weeks of data for one device, it doesn’t change much, so you can reset the data and start tracking another device. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to comment. Enjoy!
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