Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

iotawatt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#41

Post by ljosa »

mkoryak wrote: post #28

Dumb question: What do you do with this information? I can see it being useful for detecting anomalies, but for every day usage... I am not going to stop using my refrigerator to save power.

I learned that the radiant heat in the bathroom floor used very little electricity compared to heavy-hitter circuits like hot water, so it wasn’t worth adjusting the thermostat schedules and give up comfort.

We use it to keep an eye on how much energy we use for grow lights in the greenhouse.

As a bonus, the electricity usage of the well pump is a proxy for water level in the well.

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#42

Post by mediaman »

mkoryak wrote: post #28

Dumb question: What do you do with this information? I can see it being useful for detecting anomalies, but for every day usage... I am not going to stop using my refrigerator to save power.

I don't know about residential. Seems mostly to be a plaything.

But there is big potential for this in industrial settings. Imagine being able to monitor machine uptime around the clock by sensing amperage usage.

Tracking cycle time by counting cyclic spikes in current and putting it on a live dashboard.

Detecting motor degradation by sensing increases in amperage required over time.

Calculating energy consumption per pound of commodity part produced.

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#45

Post by dawnerd »

ljosa wrote: post #41
mkoryak wrote: post #28

Dumb question: What do you do with this information? I can see it being useful for detecting anomalies, but for every day usage... I am not going to stop using my refrigerator to save power.

I learned that the radiant heat in the bathroom floor used very little electricity compared to heavy-hitter circuits like hot water, so it wasn’t worth adjusting the thermostat schedules and give up comfort. We use it to keep an eye on how much energy we use for grow lights in the greenhouse. As a bonus, the electricity usage of the well pump is a proxy for water level in the well.

I track my usage with the tesla powerwall unofficial api and have since learned not to worry about my fridge, it's my dryer that really eats up all the power (and my furnace fan). Also realized leaving my lights on vs off doesn't change my usage at all so I'm not worried about turning them off like I used to.

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#46

Post by boringg »

dawnerd wrote: post #45
ljosa wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned that the radiant heat in the bathroom floor used very little electricity compared to heavy-hitter circuits like hot water, so it wasn’t worth adjusting the thermostat schedules and give up comfort. We use it to keep an eye on how much energy we use for grow lights in the greenhouse. As a bonus, the electricity usage of the well pump is a proxy for water level in the well.

I track my usage with the tesla powerwall unofficial api and have since learned not to worry about my fridge, it's my dryer that really eats up all the power (and my furnace fan). Also realized leaving my lights on vs off doesn't change my usage at all so I'm not worried about turning them off like I used to.

Beauty of leds lighting I assume?

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#47

Post by SpikedCola »

seany wrote: post #17
nickt wrote: post #13

The OpenEnergyMonitor emonPi has been around a while and also quite good, and supports MQTT which I don't think IoTaWatt does. https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/technical/emonpi/ https://openenergymonitor.org [edit] I see it can use EmonCMS which is part of the OpenEnergyMonitor project.

Have you seen any good mods for emonPi that increases the number of sensors? I really want to monitor every circuit in my panel (40)

Also would be interested in this. I've looked but haven't found anything that has 2 voltage inputs (for split-phase) and 20-40 current inputs. Tempted to build it myself, basically this[0], pared-down, pluggable into a common backplane that would have ethernet, but haven't got around to it yet.

[0] https://github.com/CircuitSetup/Split-Single-Phase-Energy-Me...

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#48

Post by xfitm3 »

alexose wrote: post #24

I bought a Sense ( https://sense.com ) because I loved the idea of applying ML to my energy consumption. While the interface is nice, it just hasn't lived up to its promise. It wants to classify 40% of my energy usage as 'unknown'. Nothing so insightful that it's really worth giving up my privacy, unfortunately. The future of IoT is open, hackable, and decentralized. The IoTaWatt looks like a big step in the right di…

How in the world can ML benefit energy consumption?

Re: IoTaWatt Open Source WiFi Electric Power Monitor

#50

Post by aemreunal »

xfitm3 wrote: post #48
alexose wrote: post #24

I bought a Sense ( https://sense.com ) because I loved the idea of applying ML to my energy consumption. While the interface is nice, it just hasn't lived up to its promise. It wants to classify 40% of my energy usage as 'unknown'. Nothing so insightful that it's really worth giving up my privacy, unfortunately. The future of IoT is open, hackable, and decentralized. The IoTaWatt looks like a big step in the right di…

How in the world can ML benefit energy consumption?

A cynical person would say "Through smartly-targeted ads for devices claiming to use less power than the ones you have" but I'm totally not one of those people.
Post reply on HN