Helping people get into EmonCMS

Emoncms
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Hi,

There are some people who would like to get their data into heatpumpmonitor.org:

Please don’t take this as indicating EmonCMS has a problem.

I’m mentioning it in case there’s a desire to bring more people along and thoughts about how to help them.

I’m letting the side down by not being able to prioritise helping them.

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If anyone wants to get their heatpump data out of Melcloud into Emoncms, I can provide a service that does that without any extra technical know-how. Just drop me a message…

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Going to be honest and say I’m not clear on the steps and data required.

I think you need some data in to emoncms.org then get that linked to the heat pump monitor site.

If so

  • Is there a cost involved?
  • What data feeds are required?

If the person can get the data out of their system, pushing it back is possible, but often not simple.

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  1. The first step is getting heat pump data into emoncms, either the main .org site or a publicly hosted instance.

  2. Then add the App called “My Heatpump”, and configure it with the following fields:

  • electricity power (W) and cumulative electricity (kWh)
  • heat power (W) and cumulative heat (kWh)
  • flow and return temperatures (C)
  • indoor and outdoor temperatures (C) (optional)
  1. Once you’ve got that set up, then there’s just a simple form to collect information about your system, and the rest then happens magically behind the scenes.

I believe that purchases of Open Energy Monitor hardware grants a free account on emoncms.org, and Trystan has offered to provide free accounts to anyone who wants to contribute their data to heatpumpmonitor.org.

The tricky part is when that data isn’t already in the EmonCMS ecosystem (step 1). Few heat pump manufacturers provide decent APIs for extracting their data, be it via software (API) or hardware (Modbus).

What we could do with is collating all the (unofficial) methods for scraping data out of heatpumps on to some Wiki page or something, so that owners can pick the appropriate method for the one they have (without poaching too much business from OEM).

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That is a really good idea :slight_smile:

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:wave: I am very interested in this!

I’ve been working on making it dead simple to mobitor (and compare) one’s heatpump using https://pvoutput.org. I’d love to send it to heatpumpmonitor.org too/instead.

The monitoring kit offered is far too expensive for many people to adopt it, especially if you live outside the UK (import duties alone would be absurd).

I’m working on collecting (and optionally combining) data from:

  • Shelly Pro 3EM (which is very affordable and easy to install, ~€125 — and is IMHO much more important than the far more expensive heat meter, because it allows insight into the behavior)
  • Vailllant heat pumps using ebusd
  • Electricity meters in Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland etc using the so-called P1-port
  • EPEX data for hourly pricing when using dynamic energy contract

All this data combined will allow monitoring not just COP, but also % of heatpump consumption covered by PV/battery vs grid (broken down by DHW vs CH, season, etc), avg cost per kWh (total, seasonal, grid-only etc) consumed and generated, and more.

I want to make all this take less than an hour to set up versus the countless of hours of tinkering it is taking me.

And … this would also allow comparing with other installs of the same heatpump, in similar houses in similar regions etc. (A friend already has the same energy consumption monitoring. It already has led to interesting insights.)

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I’m happy to help here.

I’m building an open source platform (software and hardware) to optimize energy consumption.
One of the core value proposition is that it should be VERY easy to setup.
Getting HP and energy meters integration is on the critical path of this anyway.

Can someone please tell me a bit more what they need?

So far it sounds:

  1. hardware to integrate with proprietary protocols and extract data
  2. data ingestion of existing hardware that are exporting data, but the data is not in a consumable format
  3. integration of data with the heatpumpmonitor.org platform (I’m honestly less interested in this, but it’s also low effort, so happy to look into it, along exporting the data on my platform).

If you have a heatpump, and an energy monitor and want to be a beta user to get the 3 points above implemented , let me know.

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