IoTaWatt WiFi electricity monitor on MEP-803a

[m32825]

I am running the house on the generator to burn fuel from this year's hurricane season. It's a good practice run for everyone, helping us figure out what we can combine and find any issues.

I wanted a way to monitor usage without having to go out and look at the load meter so I ordered an IoTaWatt. It gives me WiFi monitoring so I can walk around the house and try different combinations. I like it. It is an open platform and capable of doing a lot more than what I'm doing with it.

A few pictures of the IotaWatt unit, main status display, and a graph of total power usage. We were pushing limits, had the dryer and water heater going at the same time. You can see where they pulled 12.1kw for about five minutes before the 50A inlet breaker threw a flag on the play.

Once I got the graph set up I used Chromecast to put live updates on the big screen so everyone could see what was happening as we cycled between activities. Power generation command center!

I plan to mount everything in a NEMA box so I can leave it out in wet conditions.

-- Carl

 

[m32825]

A few more graphs: power vs hz, power vs volts, and power factor for each phase.

-- Carl

 

[Chainbreaker]

Wow thanks for posting that! That is a VERY useful tool! I went to their website and see that you can configure & customize it with various open source add-ons. One example:

"Uploads to influxDB and Emoncms
More sophisticated users can configure data upload to influxDB and use Grafana or one of several other visualization tools to create stunning dashboards.
There is also an option to upload to the Emoncms system with it's own integrated graphical tools:"



Looks like there is a bit of a learning curve to get up to speed but there is a user forum."

Excerpt from Forum: "IoTaWatt is an open source hardware/software project to build a low cost multi-channel electric power monitoring system. It works standalone or integrated with other open-source web server software like Emoncms 47 from the good people at openenergymonitor.org 47 or influxDB 23.
This site is where the original creator has set up shop to continue the project and converse with those that are interested or have acquired an IoTaWatt."

 

[m32825]

The graphs I posted are using the integrated capabilities that come with the IotaWatt. Not as fancy as the dashboard stuff, but easy access to the stuff most of us care about. You can add over a dozen current transformers to the system so that you can monitor individual circuits, to answer questions like "how much is my hot water heater costing me?" or "how often does my well pump run?" Great toy for data junkies!


-- Carl