We had a storm last week that dropped a bunch of leaves in my pool. When I went out after, I noticed that the skimmer had a lot of leaves in it, and the pump was really straining to pull water through.
I shut it off and cleaned it out, started it up again and all was well. Then I thought, “hmm, wonder what that looks like in IoTaWatt?”
Not much change in watts (actually, I think I originally looked at amps which didn’t change much, watts did change, maybe enough to detect/alert on), but power factor definitely took a hit, down to about .660 when it’s normally around .690 or .700.
So I added a guage on my pool monitor page in grafana, as well as an alert to send me an email if it happens again!
I added the AND condition when I got an alert when the pump shut off!
example alert email (need to work on that content!)
