How can I get my washer and dryer to text me when they’re done?

August 20, 2019 5:59 AM

How can I get my washer and dryer to text me when they’re done?

I thought about a smart plug to monitor changes in energy draw, but I only see those for classic 120V, and these have 240V plugs. They chime. They seem to often adjust their duration mid-cycle, so it’s not necessarily as simple as sychronizing our watches, although that may be what we have to resort to.

posted by blueshammer to Technology (11 answers total)

You’ll need an electrician to install it, but this device does a good jobs of identifying when different appliances turn on and off: Sense.
posted by AaRdVarK at 6:28 AM on August 20, 2019

They're almost certainly on their own circuits (at least the dryer is, are you sure the washer is 240 as well? That seems unusual). On a cursory search it looks like smart breakers exist, and they exist in 240 double pole as well. Example here. That may or may not work, but it's something to look into.

Another option would be an entire panel monitor like Neurio. I do have that, and just from looking at the energy monitor chart I can tell when lightbulbs go on, you could certainly see a dryer in that. I picked neurio because it has a well documented API, so it would be easy enough to wire up to anything else.

On preview: it's very similar to Sense - I think Sense has better appliance autodetection and IFTTT integration but Neurio's API makes it more flexible if you want to set things up yourself.
posted by true at 6:36 AM on August 20, 2019

The apparently late lamented (it no longer has a DNS entry, anyways) Random Hall Laundry Server did this, back in the day, by hotrodding sensors in series with the LEDs indicating various laundry phases. A less invasive way to do it would be to position a photoelectric sensor (connected to some sort of processing device) in front of the LEDs, if your laundry appliances use LEDs to indicate what they're doing.
posted by jackbishop at 6:42 AM on August 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

Got an old smartphone? Maybe monitor the sound levels, and if it goes quiet for 30 secs? Don’t if you’d need a custom app written.
posted by at at 7:03 AM on August 20, 2019

An expensive option, but you could get a smart washer/dryer. I just replaced my w/d with LG models that have WiFi connectivity. LG has its own app but evidently it's possible to tap into the main smart home ecosystems as well.
posted by Sublimity at 7:26 AM on August 20, 2019

I just use my phone. Put a load of laundry in and say "Hey Siri, set a timer for 60 mins"
posted by terrapin at 7:28 AM on August 20, 2019 [8 favorites]

If you have an old phone you could run in there, there are several phone-to-phone baby monitor apps that will alert on noise (also on movement if you like, which...I suppose I would want to know about too if something was moving in my laundry room and now I've creeped myself out). I used Cloud Baby Monitor when one of my dogs was very sick, so it would let me know if he was making noise or trying to get up, and it did the job. There are other popular ones with different features.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:49 AM on August 20, 2019

Incidentally, even if your washer and dryer don't have LEDs, you could probably rig up a great Arduino/Raspberry Pi alert system with a vibration sensor or accelerometer. The advantage of this over sound-sensitive systems is that they'd be less susceptible to the effects of other noises in your laundry room.
posted by jackbishop at 7:53 AM on August 20, 2019

If you use a vibration sensor, maybe you could also add detection of unbalanced loads.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:27 AM on August 20, 2019

My washer and dryer are out of earshot (and the estimated time is never accurate) so I put an inexpensive Wyze camera on the ceiling which I can check from my phone.
posted by The Deej at 10:31 AM on August 20, 2019

Wyze just came out with a sensor package, and one of the beta testers attached it to the mechanical dial.
posted by Sophont at 2:25 PM on August 20, 2019