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RatLabGuy

RatLabGuy

You look like a monkey and smell like one too
Joined
May 18, 2005
Location
Churchville, MD
The Duke Energy bill thread has got me thinking again about monitoring sources of power use around the house.
In the past when I looked at these things, the cost to buy a complete COTS system seemed to outweigh or greatly extend the payoff. However their getting cheaper and the cost of energy is going up.

Is anybody using something? Whats been your experience on the level of detail available?

It seems for residential use, they fall into 2 categories. The classical way is a bunch of CT sensors that clip onto individual circuits in your box, then you track the consumption according to circuit. A complete setup w/ a bunch of sensors is several hundred $$, like TED Pro.
The new way is via a single sensor or two on the main line that samples specific details of the inductive load and figures out the actual devices based on their distortion profile, which takes some time for a machine learning algorithm to figure out. Things like Sense, Smappee, etc. I actually understand how this works, I know guys who do exactly that kind of signal processing with device-caused electrical distortion and we use this type of SVM adaptive learning in our lab. The big downside to these though is that you are reliant on the algorithm to "find" devices, and I know from our experience that they aren't great and need a lot of data.

I'm tempted to try out a Smappee, but I don't know if the lack of specific accuracy of circuits will be frustrating. I haven't found a vendor that combines both yet? I' ma nerd, and would be happy just building my own thing w/ a Pi, Arduino and bunch of CT sensors and write a data logger but having access to the pre-made learning algorithm API would be nice....
 
What do you hope to accomplish from all that? It sounds like you already know your house isn't sealed very well, and all the appliances suck.

Nothing else really matters. If you put 100w incandescents in every fixture in the house, they're just little electric heaters, offsetting the energy that the furnace is using.
 
Mostly curiosity. I'd like to get an understanding of where most of our electricity goes. And during the summer, watching what the AC does. That's why I don't want to spend a lot on it. Our typical kwh seems a little higher for a family of 4 where the heat and water heater are not included.
For instance, I suspect the well pump setup/settings could be a more efficient system but I don't have any real data to confirm it.

Yeah, our big inefficiency is heat, which is gas, and a separate issue.
 
Well pump shouldn't matter. Its either on or off. Maybe you could decrease the shut off pressure so the pump doest strain as much right before cutoff but that's it. Now if youve got a leaky foot valve yeah your wasting energy.
 
awheelterd said:
Well pump shouldn't matter. Its either on or off. Maybe you could decrease the shut off pressure so the pump doest strain as much right before cutoff but that's it. Now if youve got a leaky foot valve yeah your wasting energy.
Click to expand...
That's the point. Yes, it's binary, but if tracked properly I can try different pressure settings and see how that affects the total energy usage in the long run, and also see for instance how often/if it's running when there shouldn't be any demand. Will that save us hundreds of $$? No, but it's a interesting thing to try out.

We had a tiny pinhole leak in a water pipe embedded in a cement slab once. No idea how long that was going, probably months, and wouldn't have even known if I hadn't noticed the dampness on the exterior brick and happened to be able to hear it in a pipe when working on a sink one day.
 
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