I’ve recently built a home energy monitor system to track home electricity usage.
If you are interested in monitoring your own home electricity usage, you can start by ordering one of these:
I bought a discontinued TED 1001 electricity usage monitor that I slightly modified so that it streams data over a serial USB connection. I bought and configured a RaspberryPi running Raspbian, and wrote a Python script that runs as a service to receive the TED data from the serial USB. The RaspberryPi then relays the data via ethernet to any service I want.
I’m currently relaying the data to three different services: Plotwatt, Bidgley and Emoncms. Plotwatt (http://www.plotwatt.com) and Bidgley (http://www.bidgley.com) are two websites that provide free energy usage analysis. I’m also hosting my own website – Emoncms (http://www.emoncms.org) – that is an open source energy visualizer. This visualizer framework provides standard modules and plugins to allow custom visualization of almost any energy data.
My end goal is to have (major) appliance level disaggregation, so I’m hoping to compare the results from Plotwatt and Bidgley. Both websites indicate they provide some level of disaggregation, however neither of them have provided results of my data yet (this may take some time). Bidgely indicates that you can “help” their algorithm learn your appliances by turning them on individually, but I have not taken the time to do this yet.
I cannot find any disaggregation plugins available for Emoncms, so I plan on attempting to create one. I’ve got some ideas of a somewhat simple algorithm I’m going to attempt on the data I’ve collected so far to see if it proves useful.
Here is a picture of my current running system:
Would love to see more detail on this project. If possible, how you configured the Raspberry etc…
I don’t have a lot of info on setting up the Raspberry pi – I just burned an SDcard with the Raspbian OS downloaded from here http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/ After that, the only thing I installed was Python (may have been on there already, I don’t remember). This can be installed via ‘sudo apt-get install python’.
The more difficult part was getting the interface from the TED1001 to the Raspberry Pi. This required some wiring modifications to the TED1001 because by default their USB port is locked out. I found this link very useful in providing a way to take the USB connection and tap it directly into the serial communication coming from the powerline communication (the TED uses a powerline network to communicate from the Display Unit to the MTU with the clamps inside your circuit breaker panel). http://cocoontech.com/forums/topic/25589-very-cheap-ted-1001-house-power-monitors-and-possible-hacking/. Originally when I built this there was a link to another website that had photos of the hardware modifications, but I can’t seem to find that site anymore. I think it was here http://gangliontwitch.com/ted/, however at the moment that link is dead.
Once the hardware modifications are made, the USB port can be accessed as a serial device on the Raspberry Pi by accessing ‘/dev/ttyUSB0’. There are many posts and links here http://cocoontech.com/forums/topic/25589-very-cheap-ted-1001-house-power-monitors-and-possible-hacking/ that show example scripts of how to read the data from the serial port and ‘decode’ it into voltage & current readings on the TED1001.
Please feel free to post and request additional information on any of these and I’ll try to post more info. I could take pictures of my hardware modifications on the TED1001, but they seem to be pretty difficult to come by anymore.
Matt
Hello,
I have an unlocked TED1001 unit but I do not have the footprints software any more. Further this software is nowwhere available, TED support claims they even do not have a copy any more!?
However then I found the Python scripts in order to read the data via USB. As I’m a beginner on Python, I have problems to understand, compile and make it run.
I was wondering if the script mentioned in the post above is available somewhere eventually some instructions how to install it and hopefully it is more understandable for me.
Thansk for your input!
Axel
Axel,
Sorry for such a late reply, unfortunately I haven’t made the script available. My script is very ugly and would need a bit of work before I would consider making it available. Were you able to get yours up and running?
Matt
Any update on the disaggregation plugin?
Carl,
I haven’t got any disaggregation working. Neither Plotwatt.com nor Bidgely.com seem to be disaggregating my appliances. I worked for a while on my own attempt, however it is a very difficult problem and I was not successful. Do you have interest in it? If there is lots of interest I may take some more time investigating it. I have also been looking into adding more devices to measure large individual appliances, however I haven’t purchased anything yet.
Matt