How to measure energy usage on my home

Hello all, I’m a long time member of the OEM site/forum but I’m running into problems with the best way to install a monitoring solution for my particular home.

The problem I’ve had so far, the electrical installation (fuse board) is located in a ground floor toilet so have the added problem of electrical installation in a area near water :frowning: so getting a 240v socket near to the fuse board is difficult to provide the AC wave form monitoring for obtaining import/export of energy.

More recently had an car EVSE (charger) installed which has been installed by splitting the meter tails (inside external meter cabinet) and installing a new circuit from that.

I’ve looked at installing an EASTRON energy meter in the fuse board (which does import/export monitoring) but now this won’t capture the EVSE energy!

Any other ideas?

Your profile doesn’t say where you are, so I’ll presume you’re in the UK. If the room contains a toilet and wash-hand basin only, and no bath or shower, I don’t know of a rule that says you can’t have a socket outlet in there. I presume the consumer unit is at a relatively high level, so again if the socket is in an area unlikely to be splashed during cleaning, I don’t think there will be a problem.

You can measure the voltage anywhere on the system, provided that you can find a cable that isn’t too long and too heavily loaded. CT leads can be extended by a few tens of metres, as could the low voltage a.c. output from the a.c. adapter or the 5V d.c USB supply, so provided that you could locate the adapter outside the restricted area, there should be no problem with having an emonTx or an emonPi in the toilet.

If you need to monitor the EVSE charger, it could be more complicated - I take it as read that you can’t have a power/voltage measuring tap there, so is it possible to get a cable into the external meter box? (A thin screened twisted pair is all you need to get a CT output into the house to an emonTx or emonPi.)

Thanks Robert, yes I’m in the UK.

Good to know that the CT sensor clips can be extended, that may be an option to get the clamp inside the meter box.

I’ve posted details several times, so a search - almost certainly of the old forums - should tell you all you need to know.