What is Tasmota

Tasmota is an open-source firmware for ESP devices, providing total local control with quick setup and updates. Controllable using MQTT, Web UI, HTTP or serial!

You can find their documentation for power monitoring here

In this day and age, more and more companies are developing a closed ecosystem for controlling devices. And for the devices that still support local control it doesn't take much for a company to change their mind and turn off the tap. As such, it's becoming more and more popular for automaters to take matters into their own hands!

Accessing Power Monitoring Data

Via a Hub

Arguably, one of the easiest ways to monitor the power usage of a plug is via a home automation hub like Home Assistant.
Such hubs will allow you to view control various parameters, and sensor data from your home automation devices.

Home Assistant showing a Tasmota Plug

Via MQTT

MQTT[^1] is the standard protocol for messaging and data exchange for the Internet of Things. It allows devices to publish messages to topics, which can then be read by subscribers.

Pro-tip - Create a consistent naming scheme for your Tasmota topics devices to prevent collisions
Eg: <room>-<device> (livingroom-lamp, bedroom-multisensor)

Tasmota allows you to configure a topic that will be used for publishing various data. For our example, the Living Room Lamp (above) has the topic of livingroom-lamp. This tells Tasmota to publish sensor information to the topic tele/livingroom-lamp/SENSOR

We can use a number of tools (Eg: MQTT Explorer) to see the following message being published:

{
  "Time": "2022-01-11T21:57:38",
  "ENERGY": {
    "TotalStartTime": "2020-10-21T22:15:00",
    "Total": 3.705,
    "Yesterday": 0.028,
    "Today": 0.026,
    "Period": 1,
    "Power": 5,
    "ApparentPower": 5,
    "ReactivePower": 0,
    "Factor": 1.00,
    "Voltage": 233,
    "Current": 0.021
  }
}

All the relevant data can be found within that JSON payload!

Via HTTP

Tasmota also exposes a basic HTTP API that can be accessed through a simple url: http://<ip>/cm?cmnd=<command>. Eg:

http://<ip>/cm?cmnd=Power+Toggle
http://<ip>/cm?cmnd=FanSpeed+2
http://<ip>/cm?cmnd=Status+10

We can use that last example to retrieve the following JSON body:

{
    "StatusSNS": {
        "Time": "2022-01-11T22:12:32",
        "ENERGY": {
            "TotalStartTime": "2020-10-21T22:15:00",
            "Total": 3.705,
            "Yesterday": 0.028,
            "Today": 0.026,
            "Period": 1,
            "Power": 5,
            "ApparentPower": 5,
            "ReactivePower": 0,
            "Factor": 1.00,
      "Voltage": 233,
      "Current": 0.021
    }
  }
}

Note: The content of StatusSNS is identical to that plublished on the full topic tele/livingroom-lamp/SENSOR

Footnotes

[^1]: 15 Frequently Asked MQTT Questions

Accessing power usage from Tasmota smart plugs

Content