What electric meter do you use?

[nite_man]

Hi,

The measurement of consumable electricity is one of the most important task in the smarthome. Does somebody use some electric meter and if yes which one and how it's integrated with LMCE?

Thanks in advance

[1audio]

No one is doing that yet. However there are two possibilities I know of.
1) Echelon is selling power meters with Lonworks powerline communications in them, but only in Italy so far.
2) The other possibility would be to hack this guy http://www.powercostmonitor.com/ and use its radio link to talk back to the core. Then work out some software to analyze the power usage and relate it to time and controlled devices. If anyone is up to the software side I'll volunteer to get the attention and cooperation of the vendor if possible.

[bulek]

Hi,

in my country I have 2 possibilities:
- contemporary power meters you get from our providers already have pulse output (you get 500 pulses in one kWh).
- you purchase local meter with pulse (or any other suitable) output for each unit (like below) :

http://download.schneider-electric.nu/snb/readfile.aspx?FILEID=SNBDB_3947&PL=FIN&FILELANG=

HTH,

regards,

Bulek.

[nite_man]

Thanks for your replays, guys. If I understand clearly nobody tries to integrate the electric meter with LinuxMCE using MODBUS protocol. I found a few meters - http://smart-home-blog.com/archives/784. But they just allow to display the energy consumption or communicate with PC using proprietary Windows based software. I suspect there should be some Linux-based one.

Unfortunately, I don't have a clear picture what I should do with the electric meter. I found that model - http://www.iskra-mis.si/index.php?id=74&L=0, which supports MODBUS. Does somebody work with it?

[1audio]

Most likely your utility won't let you provide the meter, they need to know the meter is accurate. the remote monitors are the only way in. However the latest lonworks stuff supports power monitoring and can send that back so you could monitor by load.