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…
DIY swimming pool solar heater
Upgrading my fan coil thermostats
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,…
Home voltage analysis
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…
Hot water tank controller project – part 2
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…
Smart IoT solar hot water tank controller
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…
Yet another power monitor
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…
Analysis of electricity usage per year
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…
Domestic hot water for free
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…
Every μA counts
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…
Cheap DIY power monitor
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…
Hot water usage analysis
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…
emonGLCD
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…
My Raspberry Pi knows where I am..
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…
Ultra low power sources for wireless nodes
I have been researching these days on the possibilities to use ultra low power sources for the Funky sensor. I started my research with the idea to power a Funky from a CT wrapped around a power line. This is…
Low power receiver options
There is quite some buzz in the RFM12B community recently on low power remote receiver nodes, these are remote, battery-operated nodes that would listen for incoming commands and react to them. The challenge is that keeping the RFM12B powered on all the…