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 temperatures for a few days in a row. To speed things up and extend the…
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, desired temperature and fan speed. We never use fan speed setting other than lowest, as…
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 time to do some analysis. I have 405835 measurements in total since then, taken every…
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 the unit by changing the value of an emoncms.org feed. I have three modes of…
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 feed and depending on its value run in different modes (manual on, manual off, auto…
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 two secondary windings: one will be used to power the circuitry and the other for…
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 if all my energy use optimizations have effect. I started by exporting the daily kWh…
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 my place. As a bonus I get domestic hot water for both heating and cooling…
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 do some useful work (I know people that do the same). That requires a set…
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 used a SCT-013-000 current transformer to sense the current and a 9V transformer to sense…
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 also heat a 120l hot water cylinder as I have described here. I have no…
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 and automation projects. I will be doing customizations in the future and make blog posts…
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 control: Turn down heating a bit when I am some distance away from home and…
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 entirely possible, and there are commercial products that utilize this idea, but then during my…
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 time eats battery like cheese. There are few ideas floating on how to address that…