BACKGROUND
I have always been conscious of our energy usage at home and the Geyser Timer was a project that I had been contemplating for several years but never had the time to get seriously involved, and when the Covid Lockdown started I thought this was the ideal opportunity to start developing the project in earnest.
Note: I live in South Africa and a Geyser is the equivalent of a Boiler.
UNDER THE HOOD
The hardware took several design iterations to baseline. There was also a significant amount of time spent on writing code and error checking to try and make the code “bullet proof”.
Initially the idea was just to switch the geyser ON/OFF using a scheduler but as the project developed I thought it would be neat to added a power monitoring circuit as well, this added a whole new dimension of what could be done…
The design is based on the ESP-12F WiFi platform and using the Blynk App to manage your schedule and actively monitor your power consumption. The design uses a 32mm wide Din Rail Housing that can be easily wired up into your Distribution Board.
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION
Operating Voltage 110 - 230VAC 50Hz
Isolation AC-DC converter PSU
Relay contact rating 30Amp
Power consumption accuracy within 5% (Subject to calibration accuracy and using a fixed 230V in the calculations)
WiFi Connectivity
F-RAM (Nonvolatile Ferroelectric RAM) for data storage (100 Trillion Read/Write Cycles)
USES
Geyser Timer Schedule
Power Consumption Monitoring and Utility Billing on a your own property or a guest house or condo
Pool Timer
Under Floor Heating Schedule controller
Any device that requires an Intelligent Timer
BUILD YOUR OWN
Blank boards or Built up units are available if you are interested in supporting my project. The design is complex, you will need a certain level of skill in Electronics and be familiar with writing code using the Arduino IDE and using Blynk
BASIC FUNCTIONS
- WiFi Manager to remotely setup your WiFi Credentials / Blynk Token from your smartphone
- AM & PM schedule programming
- Day of the week programming
- Holiday Mode (Ever forget to switch off your geyser before going on holiday or on a business trip?)
- Need to shower shortly? Override to force the Geyser ON
- Visual feedback on health status and schedule times
- No internal battery required. All schedules are cloud based.
- Immune to a Load Shedding (Power Blackout). In SA we have load shedding that can last anywhere from 1hr to 4hr/day….
- Connected to your home WiFi. (There is a RTC based system in the pipeline for applications where there is no WiFi Connectivity)
- Push Notification. Add the Blynk notification Widget or use the Push Safer API
- On board OLED display. This will only mimic some of the details already displayed on your smartphone and is not essential.
- Smart power consumption monitoring using a non evasive Current Clamp
- Real time power consumption - calculated every second
- Terminal Widget to display the past 12 months usage
- Tariff Slider to set up your KWH/Cost. The data will automatically update every KWH used
- Comparative Power consumption display for Today and Yesterday
- Super Chart – Real time graphic display of your power consumption. The chart is updated every second, the information can also be downloaded as an Excel CVS file for advanced analysis.
- OTA BIN File updates using BitBumper. No need for a physical connection to your computer.
BITBUMPER ZIP FILE (OTA BIN FILE UPLOAD UTILITY)
FlashEsp8266 (2).zip (992.3 KB)
ZIP FILE OF ALL THE CODE
TIME SCHEDULAR POWER ENERGY MONITOR V2-2.zip (21.7 KB)
TIME SCHEDULAR POWER ENERGY MONITOR V2-3.zip (22.3 KB)
PDF Version of the project for downloading
TIME SCHEDULAR POWER ENERGY MONITOR.pdf (3.8 MB)
