I designed, with a lot of help from this forum, an Arduino Nano based energy monitor. It is not nearly as accurate as other described here, but it was an excellent learning tool.
I preface my comment here to indicate my interest in very low cost energy meters. I found one on Aliexpress I ordered one and it is to come on Tuesday, so I am told. I’m wondering if anyone has experience with it. While it appears to have a nice display, two things come to mind immediately: how accurate is it? and can it be connected to other systems? My experience with things like this is that support for it aproaches zero … from the negative side.
What does this community think of it?
-OSD
Hi Gregg,
I’m not familiar with the device you linked to, so can’t offer any feedback there.
One low cost device that turns out to be quite accurate (at least the one I have)
is the PZEM-016 headless kWh meter.
Available on Amazon for 15 bucks.
Here’s a shot of a comparison between my PZEM-016 and my Elkor WattsOn:
The green trace of the WattsOn (a class 0.5 device) matches almost all of the
trace from the PZEM-016. The right pane shows the measured values of both
devices. (lower right corner)
Lots of info about the “016” in this thread:
Like Bill, I haven’t come across one of those, so I can’t comment on accuracy.
But I take exception to the diagram showing the voltage connections taped onto a pair of wires - no fuse or anything like it. DON’T DO THIS - you at least need a small fuse, 1A is plenty, in case something goes wrong inside the unit.
And of course, as it has a wired-in ring-core c.t, you need to be able to disconnect the cable you want to measure to thread it through the c.t.
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I’d like to report back on my experience with this meter. The meter itself seems to be acceptably accurate. The problem is with the communication to the device.
I learned that the device uses a proprietary protocol to transfer data over Bluetooth. The test program is very buggy and crashes making data logging useless.
Bottom line: If you were curious about this device I saved you a lot of time and a small amount of money. Unless, of course, you just need a stand alone meter.
OSD
Thank you for this feedback.
What you’ve experienced is one of the reasons why we generally advise people against using proprietary devices for which little or no information is available - not just for products like yours but we’ve had reported instances where ‘cost-effective’ (read “cheap or free”) on-line resources have suddenly become either non-existent or very costly.
