My washing machine has wifi, but I have never even been slightly interested in enabling it. I set up a monitor to notify when done by monitoring the power consumption of the breaker. Once it drops back down to zero after a couple of minutes, it triggers a notification. I don’t know what else I could ever need.

Remote start is what I want personally. Timers get 90% of the way there, but if you want to run your machine when power is cheap, needs a bit more granularity. Also, end notification is one thing, but getting a “remaining time” status is also useful for the particularly lazy among us :)

Ah, my power isn’t cheaper at certain times, so I missed that. I wonder if you could control and monitor all of it with an ESP32.

Probably could, but thats messy and out of reach for most of the general public. I’d myself capable, and I still haven’t done it despite wanting to.

I’d settle for appliances providing a standardised port for control/monitoring, that you can plug in your own ESP32 controller. Wifi and Homeassistant is the best we have so far though.

Rheeme Econet devices do this. They have an app to control them, but there’s also a diagnostic port that exposes everything in the app and a lot more. There’s an esp32 project that connects to the port and brings all of that into Home Assistant, no app or wifi needed.

Thats awesome, will keep that in mind for the next upgrade.

While we are shouting out cool projects, for Mitsubishi electric aircon: github.com/echavet/MitsubishiCN105ESPHome

There is also one for daiken, but I haven’t directly tried it.