Electracker - Domestic Energy Consumption Logger

I've written about this project before but I revived it after a visit to Jersey Tech Fair and meeting the nice chaps at Jersey Electricity. They tried to sell me 'Nest', a home heating automation system (they may have succeeded. Watch this space.) But we also discussed electricity consumption.

I've had a Pi attached to my electricity meter for over a year now, but doing nothing.

Now rekindled, it seems to be happily tracking my energy usage and logging the results at Thingspeak.

I'm going to leave it for a bit and then plan to do a frequency analysis on a few days worth of data.

https://thingspeak.com/channels/182833

I also added this widget to my phone:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ua.livi.thingspeakmonitor&hl=en

So now I can see live updates of my energy consumption as long as I have wifi/3G:

The code is here at github:

https://github.com/jcwyatt/electracker/blob/master/electracker_bars.py

Things I've learnt:

1) The wifi connection was really flaky - an Edimax attached to a Pi Zero. I've replaced the Edimax with a bulky Netgear with an ariel but this seems quite erratic too. Tried a better power supply.  Seems slightly better now. Made it a real pain to SSH into the Pi and also writing to Thingspeak.

2) You can't have it all ways (yet). I was initially recording every interval between flashes, and getting a really accurate reading, but couldn't write this to Thingspeak as it took too long and caused missed readings and errors due to the delay.

Now I'm counting the number of flashes in a 2 minute period and writing a calculated consumption based on this to Thingspeak. Advantages are that it give a consistent rate of readings, which looks great on Thingspeak, and at high consumption rates it should be very accurate, albeit for an average consumption over 2 minutes. However at low consumption rates the accuracy drops off; the small number of flashes per 2 minute interval kills the resolution on the measurements.

Solution:


Some kind of hybrid where it records the interval between flashes and averages this out over 2 minutes, and then writes this average data to TS.

Should be possible:

<pseudocode>

while True:
     Reset total time to 0
     Reset flashes to 0
     Wait for a flash
     Start the timer
     For 2 minutes:
            Wait for a flash
            stop the timer
            record the flash interval
            start the timer
            flashes +=1
            total time = total time + flash interval
            wait 0.07s to check the LED is off again
            repeat
      average = totaltime/flashes
      Consumption = 1.125/average

      Write Consumption to Thingspeak
</pseudocode>