What might be the right equipment to install here? Note the power socket on the wall and the consumer unit high on the wall. It is just a house being monitored so budget would max out at £60.
What do you want to measure and know?
Total house power consumption historically. I can accept some inaccuracy so estimation from current, ignoring power factor would be acceptable.
Apart from £60 budget I have a spare pi3 that can be used. I can solder, but software is my profession. Possibly the pi3 could be placed tidily in a box on the work surface and I’m guessing that a CT cable could be extended up the wall and into the box somehow.
If thinking about only measuring one “overall” circuit, where is the meter? could you install something there? either a led pulsecount directly connected to the Pi,
Or you could build a emonTx v2 and connect that by serial-direct giving you upto 3 CT’s, you may be able to add a small enclose next to the consumer unit to house a 13a socket, with the Pi, Tx v2 and AC adapters all in one box, no wires, no loss of work top space. You may need to find a frienly sparky to add the socket if you’re not comfy doing so.
The snag with a Pi is they don’t have analogue inputs, so to use the Pi on its own (without the emonTx, and without pulse counting) you’d need to add an ADC front end and a small interface circuit, effectively making it into a radio-less emonPi. I think it’s been done, but it’s not our standard configuration, and there’s no standard software for it. If you search the Archive, you might find something.