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Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

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Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#131

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

collinmanderson wrote: post #128
cbr wrote: post #67

I am bombarded with ads on Facebook for the Sense. This device allows you to monitor whole-home power consumption. ... I realized it would be extremely simple to do something similar without any wires or hassle. Sense monitors two things: * instantaneous current * instantaneous voltage Different devices have different electrical signatures, and this allows it to learn what devices you have in your house. RTL-SDR is m…

I've been recording my power and gas usage via RTL-SDR for over a year. You only get a data point a few times a minute (if that). However, I can usually (though not always), with context, tell that a big spike was my hot water heater vs air conditioner, etc. (Though it's not enough to get totals for the day/month/year per appliance.)

What are you using for reading your gas meter?

Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#132

Post by darklajid »

SergeAx wrote: post #108
glogla wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No MACs?

There are unique device Ids, they kinda like MACs.

Old thread, but GP probably talked about a different thing. Not MAC as in Ethernet..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication_code

Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#133

Post by collinmanderson »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #131
collinmanderson wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been recording my power and gas usage via RTL-SDR for over a year. You only get a data point a few times a minute (if that). However, I can usually (though not always), with context, tell that a big spike was my hot water heater vs air conditioner, etc. (Though it's not enough to get totals for the day/month/year per appliance.)

What are you using for reading your gas meter?

I'm getting both with the same antenna. Both meters have Itron brand transmitters.

Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#134

Post by collinmanderson »

tzs wrote: post #120

How does the power company actually get the information transmitted by the meter? One of the articles the author links to says that it is collected by the power company sending someone with an appropriate receiver to drive around collecting the data. However, my power company website lets you look up your usage on their website, and that is updated daily which makes me seriously doubt that there are any manual steps…

I think my power company drives pickup trucks around once a month. (and I don't have daily access to readings, so I log the data myself via RTL-SDR.)

Other companies / meters will create a mesh network and rebroadcast all data back to the utility company. (I don't believe mine does that.)

Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#135

Post by collinmanderson »

I'm late to the discussion, but I've been monitoring via RTL-SDR and rtlamr for over a year, so I figure I should weigh in. In general it was super easy to do.

- First, check to be sure your meter is compatible. (My gas and electric are both Itron) https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr/blob/master/meters.csv I recommend taking a photo of your meter. (helpful for reference and comparing numbers)

- Next buy the antenna and dongle. Probably obvious, but I tried buying one with out the antenna and it wasn't good enough, so I had to modify an old wifi router antenna to make it work. I just searched amazon for rtl-sdr.

- Once it arrives, plug it in and install the rtlsdr software/driver. I think this may have involved installing a kernel module, but I didn't run into any trouble on linux. (I used pre-compiled binaries for my old 64-bit laptop running Ubuntu 16.04) You can test things by picking up fm radio via rtl_fm.

- Next, install golang, and "go get rtlamr".

- To monitor, you first start rtl_tcp and let it run in the background, and then run rtlamr which connects (via tcp) to rtl_tcp to tune the device and get raw output.

- The dongle can get pretty warm/hot.

- My meter has the meter number printed right underneath a big barcode. The first two digits are 12 or 05 for the meter type. I found this to be a pretty easy way to find the meter.

- My meter broadcasts two extra decimal places, so if the meter display says 123456 kwh, it actually broadcasts 12345678 (I appreciate the extra precision). When processing things, I just add a 0 on the end to make it watt-hours. (This is true for gas too.)

- I get a reading from my power meter every few seconds. About once a minute for gas.

- I log all of my meter readings and append to a giant ~700mb CSV file.

- I have a once-a-minute cron job that computes per-minute usage for the last 48 hours. (I save that to a static file and then graph using nginx + javascript. I started out by graphing using excel/numbers)

- I also have a daily cron job that computers per-day usage going back to October 2016.

I keep rtlamr and rtl_tcp running using systemd. The rtlamr command I use is: /home/collin/bin/rtlamr -filterid=543xxxxx,490xxxxx -format=csv -quiet >> /home/collin/data.csv

Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#136

Post by phubbard »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #121
phubbard wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a purely local version using the Raven USB Zigbee modem, flask and D3.js. Crude, uses SQLite but might be of interest. The XML decoding is only hard part really. https://github.com/phubbard/raven-peewee

Cool! Did you have any trouble convincing your utility company to enable the ZigBee module? Or do they do things differently?

It was no problem at all - online form on the SDGE site.

Re: Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25

#137

Post by SergeAx »

darklajid wrote: post #132
SergeAx wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are unique device Ids, they kinda like MACs.

Old thread, but GP probably talked about a different thing. Not MAC as in Ethernet.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_authentication_code

Oh, those MACs) No, we've spend that bandwidth for iterators to mitigate replay attack. But the idea of one-time MAC is interesting, thank you.
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