March madness, the weather that is. March was freakishly warm and much sunnier than February (33% less heating degree days, 31% more sun). This partially resulted in 23% lower energy usage in March. Our daily average usage was down 28% from February. We generated a 345 kWh surplus in March, the first since we moved in Jan 1st.
Installation Guide6-50A sensors6-20A sensors2-150A sensorsGateway includes ethernet and serial portsBase unit connectionsBase unit (above) - Gateway (below)
We were excited to see our new eMonitor 4 from Powerhouse Dynamics arrive Wednesday. We purchased it through EnergyCircle. Sage, the rep at EnergyCircle, said it would ship first thing in the week and he wasn’t kidding. For more info see our previous post, Power monitoring – lessons learned.
The installation was very easy. The setup had a few kinks.
In January we purchased a TED5000 (The Energy Detective, 5000 series) to more accurately monitor our power usage and generation over the year. We had some intermittent problems getting it to work dependably. Eventually we were able to get it stabilized after adding an inline noise filter. Noise in this case is signal noise which can be caused by any electrical gadget plugged into a socket. All seemed well for a while and we got a great month’s worth of data for February. Then strangely TED stopped working shortly after exporting the February data, and we didn’t notice it till yesterday. Now we’ve lost 7 days of data and it still isn’t working.
We’ve been living in the house for one month and are now mostly unpacked (except for Larry’s office) so I thought it was time to give everyone the 5 cent tour.
Performance for our first month in the house. Updated Feb 5.
1 504 net usage + 369 generated = 873 kWh of total energy consumed. I goofed up earlier because I forgot the utility meter reading is a net value, not a supply value. Originally I subtracted the two values and got into a mess. Thanks Walter for spotting my error. This should be easier now that I have TED up and running.
