Real Time Home Energy Monitoring using low cost clip on meters – the Smart alternative to Smart Meters

Set out below are  some of features of the Real Time monitoring that we are doing with the new breed of low cost clip on meters – we are working with the Current Cost meters but the principle applies to many of these meters. Current Cost meters costing ~£45-60. We currently have a free application that installs on both Windows and Linux PC’s that sends the data, every minute, to our servers over the internet. The Current Cost holds a history of consumption so if the user turns their PC off then we load this data when the user turns their PC back on. Current Cost also has a simple ‘Bridge’ that send data over the internet every 5 minutes and this does not require a PC.
 
At the moment we present this data over the web using a dashboard which most users can access from their browser – requires Microsoft Silverlight. Has a range of 10 graphs that you just drag onto the main area – can display up to 4 graphs at any one time. We actually have the ability to push this data to a display in the home and currently talking to a number of companies to do this. At this stage we do not have the ability to turn appliances on/off.
 
Key Features of our Free Service
1.       Receive files every minute with each file having readings at 6 second resolution
2.       Undertaking a broad range of real time calculations on this data – including:
a.       Aggregation to half hour and daily values
b.      Calculation of baseline power using 3 hour moving average calculation – not just taking the lowest reading
c.       Comparison of current day’s half hour consumption compared to an average of every half hour for each Season and Day Type. This effectively compares a users own use against his historic performance for a similar Season and Day Type (Saturday, Sunday and Weekday) – see example graph Seasonal Average.png
d.      Calculation of any electricity tariff – currently using an E7 tariff – different rates between day and night use and different day rates once monthly cumulative consumption exceeds the tariff value. – see example graph Total HH elect ad day night tariff. Can see that the half hourly rate changes part way through the 24th March when the day rate changes
e.      Calculating cumulative savings against targets
3.       Example dashboard –  Home Energy dashboard. Includes a real time graph that updates every minute
4.       We also have a smaller video here
 
We have set up a complete Home Energy Monitoring web site if you are interested.
 
Hope that all is going well
 
All the best
 
 
Mike Everest
Meniscus Systems Ltd
(t) 01480 433714
(m) 07977 540407
www.meniscus.co.uk