Monitoring electricity consumption and solar generation

-
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...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Smart Irrigation Controller with Tasmota and Home Assistant

-
Image
I've recently been working on a smart, wifi-enabled irrigation or watering controller for my garden, and have finally got it up and running. I'll start with a picture of the finished product, so you know where this is heading. I had a few ideas for how to achieve this, and over the last few months I've been examining different options, and recently took the plunge and purchased some hardware. I've been doing a number of projects with ESP8266 based hardware, Tasmota firmware, and Home Assistant and so it was inevitable any solution I put in place would feature those elements.
Read more

Controlling Samsung Air Conditioner from Home Assistant

-
Image
I've gradually been connecting as many devices as I can using Home Assistant. One of the things that has been on my list is our WiFi connected Samsung Air Conditioner. It is a Samsung model AR24FSSSBWKN sold in Australia in around 2015. We have made use of being able to control the air conditioner using the Samsung Smart Air Conditioner Android app , but it has always been problematic. It consistently requires a username and password to be entered when using it outside of the home, recently it has stopped working inside the home, and it also requests some (in my view) unnecessary permissions (such as telephone and contacts). So, the idea of being able to control it via Home Assistant is appealing. I'd considered trying to set something up with my Broadlink IR Pro  to control it via IR, but most of the possible solutions seemed a bit clumsy. I became aware of the climate_ip custom component for Home Assistant  created by SebuZet who is active on the Home As...
Read more

PIR Sensor with Wemos D1 Mini and Tasmota

-
Image
I ordered a couple of these AM312 PIR sensors from Banggood recently, to test using them in a multi-function sensor with Tasmota . There is some good information on configuring Tasmota with these sensors , and the manual can be found here . You can see an image of the sensor below, along with pin assignments. Thanks to the creator of this image; unfortunately I can't find the original source to offer credit, but am happy to do so if you reach out to me! These PIR modules simply behave as a switch. To experiment, I've simply connected the OUT pin to D2 (GPIO4) on a Wemos D1 Mini module, and have configured the LED on D4 (GPIO2) on the Wemos to turn on when the PIR sensor is triggered, as a visual indicator. You can see the setup on a small breadboard here. The configuration is Tasmota is here. Note that the LED is on D4 (GPIO2) but needs to be pulled high to turn the LED off, and pulled low to turn the LED on. Hence, the need to invert the signal using RelayX...
Read more