Tag: Home Power Monitoring System

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Internet connected power usage monitor

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Our homes are filling with energy hungry devices. Some of them are constantly active like fridge, routers, lighting, some switched off or on stand-by. Each of them takes some portion of energy that reflects on the end month bill. Some things you can control, but some not. So in order to hunt inefficient nodes you need some sort of energy usage monitoring. You can find lots of implementations where some are simple indicators, other are advanced and web enabled. TSalwach @ github.com have built his own version of energy monitoring system which looks really promising. His implementation monitors all three phases where he extracts several parameters: RMS Voltages and currents on each phase Apparent power (product of RMS voltage and RMS current) Real (active) power Reactive power with inductance/capacitance indication (time delay method *) Power factor Frequency (zero crossing detection with linear interpolation) Energy Tariff indication Costs of energy and alternative cost (on single tariff) He used two microcontroller boards to for this task. First one is Raspberry Pi which takes care of web accessibility, data storage and interpretation. The… Continue reading

DIY Your Very Own Home Power Monitoring System

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You always want to cut off the monthly household electricity bills, but it’s remain a thought in your head, as you didn’t seem to make it becomes a reality! Instead of leaving the great idea sitting in your brain, why don’t you take some time and DIY a Home Power Monitoring System? For your information, this project is involving the use of current transducers, an arduino and some custom software to monitor power consumption for your house. Normally, all the power measurements are being collected, graphed and made public on a webserver. Based on the above figure, you can see that the graph is measured in two forms: Approximate power usage and single phase. By using this system, you can measure the use of household appliances, such as lights, computer, air-conditioner, heating system, refrigerator and much more. Frankly, it’s a very affordable project, as its cost less than $100. You can further save more, if you’re adding a serial port to a router running openwrt or using a dedicated computer connected to the arduino serial. Plus, you might want to… Continue reading