Real time consumption
 

As said in a couple messages, I ordered an assembly to get my real time consumption from the electricity meter.

I moved the spare laptop, plugged a wifi USB key, recompiled the kernel to get the wifi driver, plugged the assembly, recompiled the kernel to get the serial USB driver, wrote a couple rrdtool scripts, waited a couple days and obtained this :thumbup:
http://www.groar.org/EcoRenovator/te...PP-optipng.png
http://www.groar.org/EcoRenovator/te...PP-optipng.png

More information this week-end. :p

Tomorrow evening I should plug the assembly on the production meter and measure the PV production Friday as it should be a sunny day :cool: If it works then I'll order a second assembly to have both meters recorded in real time :)

As the protocol is full of French words or keywords based upon French words, this shouldn't work on US meters...

Denis.

Excited to see more about this project. :thumbup:

OOOooohh. Groar's getting fancy on us. Looking forward to more. :)

I updated the first post. You can see the first 3 days :

• Tuesday & Wednesday in the first picture
• Thursday in the second picture

We can clearly see the heat :

.	Living room	Bedrooms
morning	6:00-8:00	6:00-8:00
evening	17:00-22:30	18:30-21:30

and the water heater when the Off Peak hour begins at 22:30 and 2/3 times until 6:30.

Wednesday my wife was at home, she ran several washing machines and pushed the heat on comfort.

Tuesday and Thursday nobody was at home from 9 to 18 and the heat stayed on eco until 17:00. We can see a difference in the curves the avg and max data are drawing. To be investigated...

You can also see that I forgot 2 bulbs lit yesterday evening : today's min is 640W vs 456.7 on Tuesday. This corresponds to the two 90W outside bulbs... (the only 2 non CFL bulbs at home that we never switch on, so when it's the case we forget to switch them off... ;)
This corresponds to 4kWh!!! (I'm feeling so ashamed compared to Bob McGovern's daily consumption...) but on a daily meter reading this can't be seen as this is lower than the standard deviation. Thanks to the min of the graphs this is very noticeable :thumbup:

Here are the picture of my buying meter opened to the wires plugged and the picture of the transmodulator :
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...7&d=1235074561
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...8&d=1235074561

Denis.

Is it just me, or does a 600W constant draw seem pretty high? What do you have running constantly that adds up to 600W?

Today it was 640W as I forgot to switch off the lights outside :o as explained above. Tuesday it was 460W which roughly matches what I regularly see and I described in the following link :

• my measures with the wattmeter

Denis.

Today was so good that it beat the record : 7.652 kWh while my forecast for February is 5.3 kWh. As the production meter emits the same data, the assembly worked :) I just ordered a second one to have both production and consumption logged simultaneously.
My scripts had to be changed a little as that meter is configured to have a single rate, not too rates like the consumption meter (Peak/Off peak) so keywords are different and the rrdtool database structure.

Here are the graphs I generated :

• The intensity :

http://www.groar.org/EcoRenovator/te...F-12-IINST.png
But the data is rounded at the upper integer :(

• The power :

http://www.groar.org/EcoRenovator/te...DF-12-PAPP.png
In fact it is the "apparent power" in Volt.Ampere. When the production is null or small (<70W) then the meter sends 100VA. When the production is greater then the meter sends values between 250 and 270VA. Over 300VA the data seams correct, but the peaks shown between 11:00-13:30 and 16:15-17:30 are strange...

• The index :

http://www.groar.org/EcoRenovator/te...DF-12-BASE.png
In fact the graph is the difference in 2 consecutive meter readings. This works only with low resolution graphs, this is why the curve is squared. With higher resolution we see the production as pulses because the index is an integer number of Wh.

I have to improve these graphs a little...

On all the graphs, the production curve is asymmetric. This is due to the fact my solar panels are toward West. This was accentuated this morning as it was -2°C and everything was frozen, lowering the luminosity received by the panels until the thaw.

Denis.

Cost of a chicken cooking
 

This is the kind of question I can't reply to as the oven is hardwired so I can't use the watt-meter on it.

This noon we eat a 3.5 lbs chicken. It has been cooked during 1 hour at 270°C. Before that the oven was pre-heated during 15 minutes.

Here is the real time consumption during the chicken cooking :
http://www.groar.org/EcoRenovator/teleinfo/oven.png
The square and the 6 bars correspond to the chicken cooking.

A quick calculation gives : 25 minutes + 6 * 5 minutes at 2.2 kW = 2.0 kWh
ie 0.22 € at 0.1106€/kWh in peak hours.

We are using the oven only twice a month and we bought it with the house.

The peak on the first oven's bar corresponds to the micro-wave oven use.

Denis.