I was invited to do a tech talk by DEV.BG a few weeks ago, and I chose to discuss my recent heat pump upgrade project, the integration with the existing PV system, and Home Assistant. The tech talk was in…
Installing a rooftop solar panel system at our house was not a simple decision. In Bulgaria, household consumers have access to some of the lowest electricity prices in the EU, making it challenging to financially justify the cost of a…
We have a 4.88m x 2.74m x 1.22m (13m³) Bestway swimming pool in the backyard. We only use the pool when the pool water temperature is > 25°C, but it only happens if there are intensive sunshine and high ambient…
We use a DIY air-to-water heat pump for climate control (heating/cooling) of our house with a combination of water underfloor heating and fan coils in the rooms. The fan coils are equipped with basic thermostats that allow for heat/cool mode setting,…
I log the AC mains voltage at my house starting July 2013, you may recall my post where I was concerned about the unusually high voltage readings at home. Now that I have few months of data collected, it is…
I have finally found some time last weekend to finalize my smart hot water tank controller project, finalized the code and have it now running for a week. I also put up a small and simple html page to control…
I am working on a smart IoT controller for my solar hot water tank and I need to be able to control its mode of operation over the Internet. My plan is to have the controller subscribe to an emonCMS…
I seem to be doing power monitoring projects a lot, started with this one, then moved on to this, then this and now I am again putting up a power monitor.. This particular will be using a small transformer with…
I started collecting electricity usage data in April 2012, and wanted to check how am I doing this year compared to last year. Of course, as of today, only few months overlap (May-August), but still that will give me some idea…
Tricky blog post title, mostly true, but as you know there is no such thing as free lunch 😉 Anyway, those of you following my blog know that I have a Daikin air-to-air heat pump hacked into air-to-water solution for…
When you run a project on battery, you are always thinking on how to conserve power so that you run longer. In the case of wireless remote nodes you do that by sleeping a lot and only waking up briefly to…
My father asked me to create a standalone power monitor for him, he’d like attach it to some appliance and see its momentary and accumulated over time power consumption. Using OpenEnergyMonitor’s resources that was an easy task to do. I…
I thought it would be interesting to analyze our hot water usage, at this stage this is just for fun, but maybe in the future to make more it energy efficient. During the winter, I use my heat pump to…
Glyn from OpenEnergyMonitor surprised me pleasantly the other day by sending me an emonGLCD unit to evaluate – thanks! Building it was easy, and an hour later I had it working. Quite nice piece of hardware, a must-have for home monitoring…
Here is a small project with some potential in home automation. I had an idea to create a script, that would track my (and not only) location and use that information to make decisions for home automation. Some ideas: Climate…