My energy monitoring system

[gr0mit]

Well, I'm very excited.  We are getting a 3.19kWp PV system installed next week! So I will need to make some changes, but we have been monitoring our home energy consumption for a few years, and the details are below:

http://www.txrx.org.uk/energy/

I have made several changes to the code since I wrote the original C program, and will post it if anyone is interested. I'm storing all pulses into a mysql database so I can slice and dice the data in any way. 

It will be fascinating to see how things change with the PV.  Especially as my import meter is likely to wind backwards, too!

Rgds
Tim Robinson
Basingstoke

[JohnS]

Your base load looks high.  >400W for electicity.  You should be able to get his down to under 100W with a bit of planning and killing standby applications eg swithching the television and Sky box off at the mains.   

Also do you have a gas pilot light?  Constant minimum of 150W.

My experience is that it is the little bits on for 24 hours a day that give the most savings when corrected.

[Baz]

I guess a protion of the 400w is the PC. Are you running an overall home control system or just the C monitoring tool?

[gr0mit]

Yup. We have a gas pilot light.  We are looking to change the boiler - current one is Z rated!  energy approx 65% efficient.

The base load is due to a lot of stuff running 24/7.  I have an APC3000 UPS feeding my server (taking approx 85 watts 24/7) plus I run a local wifi network as an ISP so a couple of routers, wireless base stations, switches, etc.  The APC3000 is fed off a seperate AMPY submeter, which is the green part of the graph.  I think the UPS has a base load of approx 100 watts :-(

We have no sky box.  The normal home base load is the blue bit at the top.  i.e. much less than the IT gear which has to be on 24/7.

Rgds
Tim