Monitoring electricity consumption and solar generation

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I'm going to write a few retrospective posts here about some of the beginnings of my smart home obsession.

My first foray into the the world of home-smartening occurred at the time we installed solar panels on our house. At the same time, I purchased some CurrentCost EnviR monitoring device (which can be seen below) to record the solar generation data, and also our household consumption data.



The device comes with current clamps for the solar and mains wiring in the switchboard, and a couple of RF senders which send the signal to the display above.



At the time I also bought a NetSmart hub which allowed the display to send data directly to the CurrentCost website, for viewing and monitoring.


Unfortunately the CurrentCost website was poor for viewing the data, so I was able to pull the data from CurrentCost into a service called Cosm (previously called Pachube and later Xiveley) and then to PVOutput, which is an excellent service for viewing and monitoring electricity consumption and solar generation data. You can see an example of one of the first days of solar generation and consumption data on PVOutput below.


After a number of years, the Xively service changed and I needed to find another solution, which really led me down the smart home rabbit hole by requiring the purchase of a Raspberry Pi, but I'll save that for a later post...

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