Energy monitoring - going beyond smart meters...

Routing joints into oak beams is a very slow process.

But it’s good therapy.

Three weeks ago  @Simon1D  wrote

But I’ve just been forcibly reminded that Ovo is still sometimes presenting me with negative values for daily gas usage.

Given the enormous rise in the price of gas over the past months, are you now able to ‘sell’ this gas export back to OVO at a profit?

Please don’t think such suggestions haven’t been made regularly, around here, over the years ...

The majority of component parts for my own Energy Monitor have now arrived:

1. emonPi shield for sensor inputs
2. Raspberry-Pi model B+ with additional GPIO connecting cable
3. LCD display 1602 with I²C interface (concealed underneath)
4. ModBus interface module with integral DC-DC converter
5. Serial converter connecting ModBus interface to Raspberry-Pi
6. Lithium battery charger and 5v DC-DC boost converter
7. Lithium cell, 3400mAh to maintain monitoring during a mains fault
8. Antenna, 433MHz; future expansion for remote sensors
9. Smart Meter pulse optical-sensor
10. Current transformer sensor, 100A max

Power-supply and connecting leads between modules not shown in this photograph. The pink bubble-wrap is an anti-static layer to prevent damage to sensitive electronics.

Nice. Depriving yourself of the stylish Al case - or is that still on its way?

This lot wouldn’t fit in a ‘standard’ Rasp-Pi enclosure.

As I have a workshop with a 3D printer, I’ve decided to depart from the usual layout and build a case into which everything fits.

This can then be wall-mounted in a position (red dashed area) with close access to the circuits being monitored and the ModBus-style energy meters.

Both the battery export meter A and the Growatt solar inverter B have Modbus ports, currently unused.

I’ll provide some basic level of information on the Energy Monitor construction here so that others can follow.

I’m hoping that other distractions (new boiler, missing data games) will calm down soon, and I can get back to Emonpi.

Last I remember, I was struggling to tweak the pulse counting. I’m looking forward to hearing how pulse counting works in your setup for you, @Transparent 

Thanks for discussing energy monitoring devices. Personally, I feel the need of a good energy monitoring system because I do not have a way to gauge the energy consumption except for the electricity bill.

Thanks

Well @earthpoint  - you’ve certainly arrived in the right place for that discussion!

I’m making no assumption that you’re an OVO customer, because lots of people here aren’t. So let’s keep this general for the moment.

Give us some more bits of background information please:

1: Do you have a Smart Meter with an In Home Device (IHD) to show you your energy consumption?

2: Do you use the online accounts page to track your energy usage from day to day?

3: Do you want energy monitoring to help with keeping costs low, or are there other aspects of monitoring which you’re interested in:

• the proportion of renewable energy at any given point in time?
• showing which devices are consuming most electricity in the home?
• getting some idea of whether it’s viable to increase the level of insulation?
• considering changes to the way you heat the home in future?

Perhaps surprisingly, I read your comment @earthpoint and it was as if the word electricity had been emphasised. My thoughts went off on a tangent, thinking “why yes, it would be good to have better feedback on our use of gas energy”. Fortunately @Transparent has already responded correctly - collectively, we can help help with the monitoring of electricity consumption. But gas consumption remains much less accessible.

For those who worry about gas as well as electricity ...

I don’t know of any easy way to get better information than the 30 minute resolution data that our smart meter infrastructure provides. Instead of something easy, I’m reduced to spending time, pressing buttons on my gas meter at frequent intervals, just to find out exactly what my new boiler is up to, gas consumption-wise, on shorter timescales than that. (Ok that is easy, but it is really really tedious.) For example, I would really like to know if the boiler is cycling. (For example, by burning for 40 seconds at a time, but only doing that once every 5 minutes. That’s what it ends up doing, and I don’t need to make a detailed measurement to know that that is really inefficient.) That kind of thing really ought to stick out like a sore thumb, but with the kind of monitoring that is standard, it doesn’t.

Perhaps, when the new system is fully set up, it will provide me with some extra information, but I’m far from sure about that.

In the meantime, I’m reduced to setting the old (and soon-to-be-replaced) programmer to make HW come on for only 10 minutes at a time, once an hour. My money’s on that solving the cycling problem (because, from a cold start, the boiler will burn continuously for almost 10 minutes), but really - should I have to be doing this?