Our washing machine and dryer are networked (Bosch). Current benefits are secondary reasons and I could live without them:

- Notifications when done: Nice, but a beeper would work, too.

- Select program via App, based on what I put into the machine: Occasionally useful when I'm not sure. Also, I can put in my wife's cloths and let her pick the correct program (I did that wrong once and we both don't want that to happen anymore).

- The dryer can load the correct settings based on the washing machine's last cycle. Very convenient.

What's planned (primary reason): Our photovoltaic is also networked, so the plan is to eventually start the cycle when we get energy for essentially free. This saves us money and allows us to use more clean energy instead of the grid mix. I guess the non-smart variant also supports this by setting the "finished in x hours".

What I don't like: Our smart home is fully offline, except for these two appliances. I thought there was a local API, but last time I checked I could not find the info anymore. Also, they sometimes lose connectivity to their cloud (not sure why, maybe hick-ups after that archaic 24h disconnect) and need to be restarted to reconnect.

Edit: Ah, mind we did first replace the old, power-wasting dryer with the new one (amortized after ~2y). Later when the old washing machine started failing, we got this one (which is also better suited for our needs, regarding size; and generally uses less water IIRC). I wouldn't have replaced good units for the sake of smartness. Obviously we could have saved some money by getting more basic appliances, but we had good timing on offers.

> Select program via App

I'm guessing this was mostly the reason it has any connectivity at all. If they can convince you to run an app they can start getting all kinds of data off your cell phone 24/7 if they wanted to, even if the app requests no permissions at all.

Living in Europe the GDPR applies, and with Bosch there is a better chance that they stick to it compared to other brands. Of course I don't know for sure.

The app transferred 1.56MB of data in 3.5 months. While the could include lots of data that I don't want them to have, at least it's not a massive amount indicating non stop tracking.

Ultimately you're right, and I would love to have the two appliances fully local (the other smart things don't even have Internet access, thanks to awesome projects such as Tasmota or Valetudo), including fancy program selection.

All of these use cases are a huge argument for "home hub" standards and aggregation and (user controlled) filtering.

None of which would happen because then "the product" would stop letting the exploitation happen.

I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful.

It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)

This is the best approach, if you can do it. Keep the devices dumb and add in whatever modules you need on top to make them as "smart" as you want them to be.

Some Ikea stuff does it halfway. Local-only Zigbee, so it's not exactly dumb, but if you want to go online you can buy a gateway.

Wait an hour. It’s done.

Our washing machine offers various programs between 30 minutes and 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Yes, it's not hard to set an alarm, except the timing on the washing machine is unreliable (I've lost count of how many times I've set an alarn with a few minutes extra and still had to wait longer.) It would just be nice to have a little notification - making that chore 1% pleasanter. :)

They all make a sound when done, you could set up a SoC with a microphone to listen to it. Or monitor power draw. Many ways to do it externally.

My worry would be that you'd have to do some diagnostics on the audio to determine the actual sound. The loudest noise my washer makes is the spin/rinse cycle, which is right before the sound it makes when it's done. You can't just key off of "loud noise" and I don't know how hard setting up to listen to specific frequencies for alerting is.

> You can't just key off of "loud noise" and I don't know how hard setting up to listen to specific frequencies for alerting is.

Fast fourier transform on the audio would give you volume for each frequency range. That probably requires some DIY hardware & programming.

But a power metering plug would be a cheap off-the-shelf solution. Find the ones pre-flashed with ESPhome for ~$15-20, find thresholds for ON/OFF with a bit of trial and error, and you're done.

Yea, I'm for sure that it's possible, but it's harder than just getting a sensor for noises larger than some Db.

Then key off of "noise, noise, noise, noise....no noise, no noise, no noise". Done. Can maybe even attach a vibration sensor to the machine...

Even easier than that: Amazon's Echo devices can be set up to detect beeps.

I have one in my kitchen, near the laundry room, and one in my home office. When things beep in that area, the one in the office says "Beep, beep." (I could have it do other stuff, but this was simple.)

It works for laundry. And the dishwasher. And the Instant Pot. And any other beepin' thing. It's just a remote beep detector.

(And if it detects beeping for 2 or more minutes, it notifies my phone, since that presumably means that my house is on fire.)

> It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw;

Can confirm, it's what I do. I can even detect which part of the cycle it is in using plain Home Assistant template sensors.

It's crude but it works. Detecting washing vs not is trivial, but I went the extra mile, looking at the power history and analysed the thing visually to get the general profile of each part, taking into account peaks, throughs, noise to have some unambiguous rules. Some are wrong if taken in isolation but taking the order of priority into account, flattening the result with if/elif in a single state sensor it becomes correct. That strategy is also very easy to debug visually with a entity history list in the dashboard.

I could probably also detect error states (which I had a few, like filter clogged with lint preventing water drain) as in this case the panel stays lit with the error code basically forever VS a normal cycle has it lit but ultimately it shuts down to deeper sleep states once it's done.

I really enjoy making dumb devices smart, it's a nice decoupling too and means I can just change e.g washing machine if it dies, adjust a few values below, and be all the merrier.

(nixos config, but it's a 1:1 to YAML and you get the idea)

    services.home-assistant = {
    #...

    config = {
    #...
      template = [
        # washing machine
        # 5-6W: on (idle, panel lit)
        # 4-5W: off (sleep after on, panel unlit)
        # 0.1-1W: off (deep sleep)
        # 2100-2200W: water heating
        # noisy 8-100W, trough 10W: washing
        # ramp-up 15-500W, plateau 300-500W, noisy 100W: spin dry
        # 1300-1500W, trough 40W-150W: tumble dry
        # 7.5-8W 240s, peak 95-105W, 20-25W 30s: cooldown
        {
          sensor = [
            {
              name = "washing_machine_power";
              unit_of_measurement = "W";
              state_class = "measurement";
              state = "{{ states('sensor.shellyplusplugs_80646fc7bb4c_switch_0_power') }}";
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_state";
              state = ''
                {% if is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_heating', 'on') %}                          
                  heating
                {% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_drying', 'on') %}
                  drying
                {% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_spinning', 'on') %}
                  spinning
                {% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_cooling', 'on') %}
                  cooling
                {% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_washing', 'on') %}
                  washing
                {% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_idle', 'on') %}
                  idle
                {% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_sleeping', 'on') %}
                  sleeping
                {% elif states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | float(default=0) < 0.01 %}
                  off
                {% endif %}
              '';
            }
          ];
          binary_sensor = [
            {
              name = "washing_machine_active";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 30 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { minutes = 2; };
              delay_off = { minutes = 2; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_heating";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1900 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 10; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_drying";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1000 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 1600 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 120; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_washing";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 30 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 150 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 120; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 45; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_spinning";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 150 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 500 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 5; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_cooling";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 6 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 30 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 90; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 60; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_idle";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 6 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 1; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 1; };
            }
            {
              name = "washing_machine_sleeping";
              state = ''
                {{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | float(default=0) > 0.01 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 1 }}
              '';
              delay_on = { seconds = 1; };
              delay_off = { seconds = 1; };
            }
          ];
        }
      ];

Sometimes I feel a little dumb here. I don't know what kind of master of evil would wake a day and think about hacking the vault that keeps their underwear safe and sound, but I love it.

Now is time to add "flamethrower_mode", lock online and send mail offering the regain_access_to_your_precious_cozy_pajamas code for a fair fee, and became the hidden kings of the undieworld with our "pay_per_brief" program. Muahahah!

I guess it might be quite fun to graph that and overlay the graph of the current cycle over an original benchmark - it might indicate when, for example, the heating element was no longer working as efficiently.

I imagine that would get complicated pretty quickly. Water takes significantly longer to heat up in the winter just because it's so much colder to begin with.

Similarly basically all washing machines today weight laundry and stuff then tune cycle duration, amount of water, drying time (if applicable), etc...

My Miele washer and dryer send me notifications when done.

That is, I think, the only valid use case. I have an AEG washer that does some voodoo to decide wash times and only shows the estimate at the start, then it weighs the clothes, looks at how dirty they are and so on. The washer is two floors down and I never know when it’s actually done. As a side note, I think my washer is “smart” ready, meaning it has all the electronics already in and the panel has the lights already installed, just that it’s not activated because a didn’t pay another 100 euros for it.

I guess another use case would be measuring water and energy consumption but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things.

"but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things."

Some people do - to brag in their circles (and to their own consciousness) how green they are. So then you can go flying around the world for fun with a clear consciousness ...

I sometimes use it to start the machine remotely when I'm away the whole day, so I can time it to be ready when I get home and can switch over the clothes to the tumbler immediately.

You can use Bluetooth for that though, and it would probably be cheaper.

Bluetooth requires a paired device and has range issues.

I'd see the internet connected route as useful for anyone in the household to be able to check notification without having to pair all the phones (and then what if you don't want it on a phone), and getting the notification when outside. Now it would better with a home server dealing with the data, but we're so far from that.

In general I see bluetooth as fine for personal wearables (headphones) and not great when a device is shared (bathroom scales, smart plugs, switches etc)

ISTR you can use a Bluetooth beacon without pairing. Range might be mitigated by using a decent antenna, but might run into legal power limits.

Definitively possible. It’s what I do with my dumb washing machine. Just have your home automation tool of choice notify you if power draw moves below 5w or something.

We live in a smaller appartment building with a shared laundry room with two machines. They both say exactly how many minutes the laundry has left so we just set our timer for the last machine. They take between 35 and 55 minutes per run. We can run 6-8 machines in the five hour slot we can book. Since they slowly get desynced depending on what program you run, there is no need to get a notification. You have 20 minutes to sit until the next machine needs taking care of :-)

Even dumber: I sense when the washer door has been closed longer than 70 minutes (the longest cycle is just shy of that), and start making a loud noise, which continues until the door is opened.

Simple as that, no wireless components required. I simply leave the door open when the machine isn't running.

People want notifications so they knew immediately when the laundry is ready: Either to take it out before it gets musty, or to start another load as soon as possible.

I have the very simple one. I can hear it across the apartment, because the spinning is noticeable. The actual washing is even louder.

   Siri set a timer for *looks at washer screen* minutes

That's it. But tbh wish my smart speakers would learn all the appliance chimes instead.

My dryer will straight up lie to me and say “20 minutes” for anything between 0 and 60 minutes. I think it realizes the clothes are still too damp and just keeps running, but whatever differential equation it’s using to predict time remaining seems flawed.

When that happens to me, my solution is to pause the cycle, clear the lint screen, and resume. Lint screen is always cleaned before a cycle, but sometimes a single load produces enough lint to be a problem.

And having written that out, now I want a notification from my dryer when it’s not making progress as fast as it expects…

My dryer timer is reasonably accurate, but on my washing machine the last two minutes are like the last two minutes of a football game.

Yep - ours seems to take 0-10 minutes longer than it predicts at the start.

My washing machine is a liar, I'll start a 3 hour program and in 10 minutes it'll say 2h20min remaining. Sometimes I check up on it and it says 20 minutes remaining, but it then takes another 30-40 minutes until it's actually done.

That link doesn't support what you're saying.

Someone might be able to do that if they're monitoring power usage directly on the CPU with >microsecond precision for an extended period of time, not with a power metering plug that gives a fairly inaccurate reading at the wall every second or two, after having gone through the power supply transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and containing noise from every other component in your device.

I get significantly cheaper electricity at night ($0.12 vs > $0.50/kwh, stupid California). Being able to schedule saves money, not that WiFi is necessarily required.

A lot of washing machines remember their previous state when the power goes out.

You can use this to your advantage using a smart switch: start the wash cycle, turn off the power straight after. When you turn the power back on at a scheduled time (using the smart switch), the washing machine will pick up where it left off (at the beginning of the cycle).

Also a lot of them just have a timer built-in anyway.

Careful about switching large inductive loads on a smart switch, the ones I’d looked at weren’t rated for big inductive loads (like the motor inside a washing machine or a dryer).

Inductive loads are less of a problem for alternating current. (Still a bit of an issue, though).

I was thinking more, turn the switch off within a few seconds of starting the cycle. Usually nothing happens in that time other than the drain pump doing a quick cycle to remove any residual water.

This is exactly what I do with my dishwasher. I load the dishes at night, start the cycle and immediately switch off the smart switch while it is just trying to empty any residual water. The smart switch turns on every night at 3 am and the washer resumes with whatever settings I had chosen. By the time I'm awake the washing has just finished.

Did you check how much power your washer uses? Mine uses 0.4 kwh so you'd be saving 15.2 cents per load. Not really worth the hassle IMO.

The dryer is more interesting

You've neglected to include the energy used to heat the water.

Yes, using ~cold water - washer does not have hot water inlet and using "daily" programme.

n.b. it's pretty new albeit cheap generic Midea front loader

How much electricity is your washing machine using?

I could imagine a situation like, "I will be out all day and only return in the late evening - if I start the wash cycle when leaving, it will sit wet in the machine all day. But if I start it when I return, I will have to stay awake to put it in the dryer. I'd like to start it on a timer so the wash cycle finishes just as I return." But that's both pretty contrived and most non-smart washing machines can do that with a timer anyway.

When I was in college, the machines in my dorm building’s laundry room would send you an SMS when the cycle finished. It was super handy, and would be awesome to have if your home is multi-level (or the machine is tucked away where no one can hear it scream)

So we have three laundry rooms here where I live, and they were all managed by CSC ServiceWorks until recently. When I first moved in, CSC had an amazing system setup, whereby you could go to their website and see a real-time animation of all the machines in the room, their current status, and their remaining time. This page updated very rapidly and always showed accurate information, including any machines that were out of service.

Therefore, it was very easy for me to put together some laundry loads, and then navigate to that website and see exactly whether I'd be able to go downstairs and start my loads immediately, or how long I'd need to wait until machines were freed up for my purposes.

Then they enshittified it. They took away the central payment kiosk and installed individual card readers on each machine. These card readers had some unholy mix of Bluetooth and WiFi on them and the new app was completely incompatible with the Android tablet I had at the time. Apparently it was mandatory to have both Internet and BT access before you could even start a machine anymore. To add insult to injury, they deprecated the public status website and walled up the status reports inside the app. In fact, you couldn't even get a report until you'd paid to start one of the machines, thus invalidating my old strategy of proactively checking for availability.

Then there was a protracted battle between landlady and CSC whereby there were many malfunctions and accusations about whose responsibility it was. The pandemic struck, and there was some third-party disinfecting service that was supposed to be sanitizing machines, but left huge gobs of lint and detritus behind them all anyway.

Eventually it came to a head, and the landlady severed their contract with CSC and brought in a new service company. They have apps and cash preloading and whatever and you know what? I stopped using the laundry room entirely. Now I bring my clothes to a Wash & Fold service, and have it professionally cleaned, because doing laundry is too strenuous for me anymore. Problem solved!

Most people I know who have the connected "white" appliances are mostly interested in the reported resource usage. I have a connected LG dishwasher, and it's possible to have it report water usage, electricity usage, and other stats to home automation hubs (like home assistant) for aggregation.

I'm not so into that, but I know people who buy connected domestic things for that very reason.

Notifications are my main use case. The huge gaping downside is that they removed every dial and most buttons so unless you want a “normal” cycle you have to use an app to select the cycle. It’s neat that there are specific cycles for specific things and all, but not even having a “permanent press” option selectable without an app is incredibly stupid.

I have an LG Washer/Dryer with smart functions.

As others have said, the notifications are useful, but you can also track the wash/dry cycle and see what it's done so far, what is left and the estimated remaining time.

I like it because the smart features are optional and are genuinely useful.

My sister has such a smart washer and funds these same features useful.

I had to helo her get it connected to wifi - it would not stay connected. Turns out she was on the same channel as literally all her neighbors.

Well, clearly if manufacturers want to continue making their machines less like they used to, they'll need all the analytics they can get to figure out which A/B tested engineered failures result in the lowest continued usage.

I have a smart plug on my washing machine and dryer which I use to try and identify when the cycles have finished.

It doesn't work great, I'd much prefer a direct API to send a notification when the machine says it's actually finished.

You can buy smart vibrations sensors for that. No vibrating should mean it’s done, unless it lets the clothes soak- I have no idea, washed clothes hundreds of times but I’ve never looked to see what the washer actually does

Zwave & zigbee + HA or another home automation platform > some wifi connected data mining crap with vendor lockin for turning off lights across the room.

Progress tracking, diagnostics, temperature tracking, load unevenness alerting, remote disable if broken, etc.

Really? “Hey your washing is done, come move it to the dryer.”

“Hey, it’s been a year since you replaced your filters.”

Here’s the only terrible use case I’ve found; my Samsung washer and dryer now interrupt movies on my Samsung TV to let me know when they complete a cycle.