A few years back I used to have a load of power monitoring stuff hooked up to the house electricity supply, but then we had a lot of electrical work done and it had to be removed. I didn’t get around to reinstalling it.
I’ve decided that now is the time. It’s quite old kit, using some RFXcom meters and receivers that I used for a work project about ten years ago, but it looks like they still work so I’m going to see what I can achieve.
So far I’ve connected up current sensors on the power feeds from the main meter and solar PV generation meter and to the main part of the house, the “granny annexe” (which also includes the workshop, though I may be able to split that out later) and the pool house. I have a perl script that I quickly hacked up to read the incoming data and write it to the terminal, and that’s it.
I’m quite tempted now to set up an MQTT broker to which I can publish power consumption data and, assuming it’s possible, then use some of the Open Energy Monitor code to process that and make it available on a website.
If that works then I can also look at publishing my weather data to MQTT and perhaps use WeeWx to process that.
And if that all works then I can probably take things even further. It may perhaps be possible to monitor the temperature in my greenhouse(s), for instance. And I’m wondering if it is feasible to make a little 1-wire temperature sensor unit that would plug into a mains socket and report room temperatures via wifi.
Another possibility is to add sensors to count the LED pulses on the mains and solar PV meters just to compare the readings with the current transformer ones.
And for the sake of completeness (and perhaps so I don’t forget) I’ll mention that I could possibly butcher the transformer inputs for the RFX metering units so inputs from the same electricity phase only need one transformer to measure voltage levels rather than one per sensor, as I have five plugged in at the moment which is a bit extreme.
There’s probably other stuff I should look at too, such as running all this stuff inside containers.
Lots to think about 🙂