You need flow meters and a software program, both of which there are hundreds.
You need flow meters and a software program, both of which there are hundreds.
My electronic knowledge is stuck somewhere back in the 1960's so please bear with me.
I'd like to monitor my household gas, water and electricity to a more sophisticated level than just occasionally going and reading the meter.
Meters are available which emit a pulse every time a certain quantity of gas, water etc passes. I think I can handle this bit - either I persuade the utility company to fit them or I have my own downstream of the main meter.
I want to capture the signal and store it in a device which can then download to a computer for processing with tables and graphs showing consumption figures.
What do I need to do this?
I did this a while back to monitor the electric water heater. Used a clamp-on AC current probe into a Radio Shack DVM with RS-232 Interface into a laptop computer. Was interesting for about 20 minutes. If I were to do it over, I'd probably use a PIC processor on the current probe to log the data. But for cost, you can't beat a laptop. On a bad day, 386 laptops are a dime a dozen. On a good day, they're free.
What is your objective? Collecting data is useless unless you're gonna change something based on the data. If you want to save money, use less. You don't need a computer to tell you that your hot shower costs money. Shorter showers means less cost.
Here are some examples. I worried about the cost of the water heater. So I instrumented it. Then I discovered that the thermal time constant of a hot water heater is so long that there ain't much you can do by turning it on/off. Unless you're on time-based electricity cost...and you still don't need instrumentation to tell you when to turn it on/off. All you need is a cost/price/schedule list from the utility and a clock.
Another interesting thing I learned was that the computer I was running all the time to play mp3s was costing me several bucks a month in electricity. Didn't need instrumentation to figure that out, but the instrumentation did give me cause to think about such things. You might spend more in instrumenting it than you can save.
So I learned that thinking about energy use and minimizing it everywhere all the time was more important than trying to monitor it.
"Sorry kids, you've used up your hot water allocation for today. Shower is off 'till tomorrow" just ain't gonna cut it. mike
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bear
the
meter.
Many thanks for the replies. I know that this might not ultimately make economic sense for home use, but I'm an environmental consultant. Mostly I advise industry on pollution problems. Sometimes I do water audits involving reading various meters around the works. I want to understand the technology involved in remote monitoring, without making expensive mistakes.
Then it would probably make sense to contact the utility companies, and see if they have any ideas on it. They might even already have something that does exactly what you're looking for, and they've almose certainly got many years' experience in the conservation department (pum unintended, but noted. :-) )
Good Luck! Rich
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