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Power / Electricity Apps?
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03-10-2022 11:19am#1
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Jeeze!!! why so negative....the OP is obviously interested in managing his electricity usage and if you are not measuring you are not managing...as the saying goes.
I'm not saying people have to go into the detail I do (I have an EV and heat pump etc so a significant electricity bill) but peoples elect bills are getting significant and you need to see if there is anything unusual or if nothing else to discount things. I have my wife set up on Home Assistant as well now and she now looks in to see how much we are using and if there is anything out of the ordinary.
For example one of my young fellas like to open the window during winter and as a result the HP could be kicking in all the time...or a stat might be set too high and again the HP will be kicking in all the time. You have to pick these up EARLY or else you could be a few weeks down the road facing a massive electricity bill. Spending a few bucks getting an energy monitor is well worth the investment particularly now.
6.1kWp south facing, South of Cork City
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Hi
Sorry it took a bit I'm in the middle of setting up some ZigBee temp sensors around the house and boy are they frustrating to set up for some reason..
Anyway for my energy monitoring in my house I use Home Assistant (HA) Home Assistant (home-assistant.io) on a Raspberry Pi 4b as with HA you can do a way more with it than switching on the lights or using it to log your energy. Also, it is compatible with practically all vendors and suppliers so you are not stuck with one brand.
I am going to assume you know how to set up HA and to do all that stuff YouTube will be your friend there.
I decided to use the ShellyEM Shelly EM - Shelly Cloud from a recommendation from a poster on boards.ie. To be honest after looking at one or two YouTubes I was a bit nervous myself as you a have to mess around in your electrical board. Its a small little thing see picture below and basically what it does it monitors your electricity power/consumption/voltage/power factor and few other things through CT clamps. What this means is you clamp it around a cable in your main consumer board. So it logs circuits in your house not individual pieces of equipment unless they have their own circuit like the Heat Pump or your EV charger. Otherwise, it will log the downstairs plugs for example because that's a sperate circuit
The tricky part is that the Shelly needs power to do all this... and to do this you need to wire a live and neutral into the Shelly from the board to give it power. If you look at the picture above the two white wires are the CT clamps and the brown and blue are the power going to the Shelly. It sounds like you should be an electrician (any maybe you should..) but all that means is taking a feed off one on the trips in the board. See picture below the Brown and Blue highlighted are from the Shelly. What you do is loosen the clamp screws on the trip and slip the brown (live) into the L and the Blue (N) into the neutral side and you should be good. Make sure you fit them to the same circuit.
********Points to note POWER DOWN THE ENTIRE BOARD FROM THE MAIN TRIP SWITCH.....EVEN THINK ABOUT TRIPPING ALL THE TRIPS TO BE SURE...IF YOU HAVE SOLAR MAKE SURE YOU ISOLATE THIS ALSO....
ALSO ASSUME EVERY WIRE IS STILL LIVE EVEN AFTER DOING THIS AND IT CAN KILL YOU.....
USE INSULATED SCREW DRIVERS
IF YOU ARE NOT SURE YOU CAN DO THEN GET AN ELECTRICAN...IM AM NOT AN ELECTRICAN SO TAKE MY NOTES AS COMING FROM SUCH.********
(Also I just noticed there is some exposed conductor from a second Shelly feed (to the left on the highlighted one and I have fixed this now 😯
One you have the power connected you then need to fit the CT clamps to whatever circuit you want logged. One Shelly EM can log 2 circuits so you will want to do the Main ESB incomer and then whatever else. I have 3 Shellys so I log my PV, panels, the Heat Pump, the EV charger, the utility room sockets and then the kitchen island which has a dishwasher and a Quooker tap (but I rotate this last one around from time to time for example I might log the ovens.
The following picture shows the CT clamps the only thing here is that they need to be clamped around the live and they have to be orientated in the direction of the current (there is an arrow on the clamp) if you get them the wrong way it will show negative values. This is good though if you have PV as you can monitor if you are exporting as it will go to negative, just make sure you put the main ESB incomer clamp on before the PV feed
Once you have the Shelly's all wired in power back up the board (and hopefully nothing will trip) You then need to download the Shelly app and follow the instructions there to discover them. They use WiFi so you might need to make sure you have strong enough signal at the board. You can get readings and graphs off the Shelly app if you don't have HA.
Once they are connected to Wifi Home Assistant picked them up straight away and I could add them to my system. As I mentioned before I won't go into too much about setting up HA as that would take forever. But you can build all type of dash boards such as below
and they have a specific energy dashboard that is very useful such as below but it doesn't get into too much detail
For that I use Grafana in HA, you can really drill down into the data what came on when or how log its has been on.
Hope that helps some people, I wouldn't be too afraid in doing it but you do need some bit of cop on and if you are not comfortable around plugs and wires then this is not for you.
Please don't kill yourself and treat everything like it is live even when you think there is no power to the board.....
6.1kWp south facing, South of Cork City
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I treated myself to one of these for my birthday (I know - sad!)
It's a Zigbee device and sticks on to the front of my meter. It counts usage based on the 1000 flashes per kW the meter makes, and is in almost exact agreement with the end of day readings on my provider's account. It worked perfectly with Home Assistant using a conbee stick on a Raspberry Pi 4.
I'm still not even half way through the first month since starting the readings, but this gives an idea of what you can record. I also have daily and 15 minute readings going as well as a more visual meter for consumption in the current hour, but this is the best info. It's a battery operated device so no interference with any wiring in the box required.
The device worked perfectly for me before I switched to the new tariff as it just reads flashes, and the readings I took in the first two weeks were what convinced me to move to the smart tariff I chose.
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I'm using Similar but a more DIY version.
https://github.com/Farmer-Eds-Shed/Home-Assistant-Energy-Monitoring
Great thing about Home Assistant is it's not just monitoring but can be used to schedule heavy appliances for the cheaper times.
For example I schedule the immersion for night rate except Friday and Saturday nights as Saturday is free during the day and also based on weather forecast (Cloud %) as I have solar Hot water and no point heating water at night at all if clear weather is expected.
Post edited by emaherx on1 -
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