Know when the washing is done, from the power the machine draws.
Version: 1.11.0 | Author: CliveS & Claude | Needs: Indigo 2022.1 or later, and a plug or meter that reports watts
Read the full guide — setting up, what everything means, and what to do when something goes wrong.
This plugin lets Indigo tell you when a washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher or any other appliance with a cycle has started and finished. It watches the power the appliance draws through a plug or meter that Indigo already reads, so the appliance needs nothing fitted. It only watches, and never switches anything on or off.
- Tells you when the cycle has finished and the door is ready to open, after a delay you set to match the appliance's door lock, and can tell you when a cycle starts as well.
- Reminds you to switch off the wall socket a while after the cycle ends, if no new cycle has started.
- Sends the alerts by Pushover or email, or both, to one person or several, with titles you choose for each appliance.
- Records each cycle — how long it ran, its highest power draw, the energy it used and, if you give it your electricity price, what it cost.
- Runs your own triggers when a cycle starts, when the door is ready, when the socket reminder is due, and when a cycle runs far longer than it should.
- Does not mistake a pause for the end. The power has to stay low for a few minutes before a cycle counts as finished, so a rest between rinse and spin is not taken as the end of the wash.
- Checks what the meter tells it. A meter that has been deleted, or has lost its watts reading, is shown in red rather than read as an appliance doing nothing, and an energy figure the cycle could not have used is rejected rather than recorded.
Any Indigo device that reports an appliance's power in watts. I use Shelly plugs running under my Shelly Direct plugin, and the settings start with the names that plugin uses, so with a Shelly Direct plug you only need to pick the plug. For phone alerts you need the Pushover plugin in Indigo, and for email the Email+ plugin.
- Go to the Releases page and download
ApplianceMonitor.indigoPlugin.zip - Unzip the downloaded file — you will get
ApplianceMonitor.indigoPlugin - Double-click
ApplianceMonitor.indigoPlugin— Indigo will install it automatically
- Create a New Device, set the type to Appliance Monitor, and pick the plug or meter the appliance is plugged into in Power meter device.
- If the meter is not a Shelly Direct plug, change Power state name and Energy state name to the names your meter uses. Indigo will not save a name the meter does not have, and lists the ones it does have.
- Tick the Pushover and email alerts you want, and click Save. The starting thresholds and delays suit a washing machine.
- Run the appliance. The device shows running within about 40 seconds, and the Event Log records the cycle when it ends.
The full guide goes through each step, explains every setting, and shows how to tune the thresholds for other appliances.
v1.11.0 — A meter fault shown in red on an appliance now stays there until the meter reads properly again. Resetting the appliance to idle used to clear it while the fault was still there.
v1.10.0 — A new appliance on a meter other than a Shelly plug now saves without first clearing Meter online state key, as the help beside it always said it would.
v1.9.3 — The help beside several settings in the appliance's settings window was cut off part-way through. It now sits on its own lines, where it can be read in full. No setting or behaviour changed.
Every version is listed in the version history.
Vibed into existence by CliveS, who knew what he wanted, argued until he got it, and tested it on a real house. Typed at inhuman speed by Claude (Anthropic), who mostly did as it was told.
© 2026 CliveS · MIT licence — copy it, fork it, bend it, break it, fix it, ship it. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.