My Electric Time Of Use App For Economy 10

I am not sure it is normal, but that’s the way my electricity supplier has set it up. No doubt the reasons include avoiding having power demand surges at the beginning of these cheaper rate periods, and also just to confuse customers.

My guess is it’s a carry-over from the time when they used synchronous motor mechanical time clocks to switch over, and clearly it was impractical to reset all of those twice-yearly.

@TrystanLea some of the comments above remind me that emoncms really should have a central settings for things like region, time formats, currency etc. at the moment every app appears to re-invent the wheel for this.

Additionally, feeds/inputs would be really useful to be able to allocate a “unit” label!

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It does have a central area for this, it’s on the user account timezone settings.
If you use the schedule module as i recommended earlier it does have a way to deal with winter and summer time differently, or in a similar way, you configure it the way you need.

Just noticed the power view in your app @Greebo, amazing!

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Thanks @TrystanLea, I’ve never used flot before (or jquery for that matter) so it took a bit of reading to figure out what options I had and how to do that. Its not the most efficient implementation but it is effective. It does go a bit weird if there’s missing data, I know how to fix that but haven’t been inspired to do so yet :slight_smile:

@TrystanLea just noticed that you have pushed the changes for these apps into emoncms.org my app isn’t working as it also needs the change to the emoncms core for the “https://emoncms.org/feed/data.json” calls

Is it possible to add/remove tariffs to the Cost Comparison app?

I see that your excellent Time Of Use Flexible app is in the master branch now - £ sign working. However, if I update from EmonPi, I lose your app. @Trystan any comments?

That could be because of the changes we made for you to test it, If you’re still pointing at my git repo for that folder, it could be trying to update from there.
If you still have the backup “app” folder, try putting that back in place and doing another update. If that fails (or you don’t have the backup folder) post again and I’ll think of something else :slight_smile:

Thanks @Greebo. It’s in the master but not the stable release - presumably the emonpi update references the stable release, not the master, hence why it disappears.

This will switch you to master branch for just the app folder:

cd /var/www/emoncms/Modules/app
git checkout master

Yes, but you will have to modify the javascript file on the PI - perhaps you can submit your changes back to the project via github afterwards?

The github file is located here

https://github.com/emoncms/app/blob/master/lib/costcomparison_rates.js

There are comments in the script to indicate whats going on, let me know how you get on

Thanks @Greebo. Would you be able to have a look at this? To see what my BST figures would look like, I created another instance of the TOU Flexible app, and put in different tier start times. I use most of my electricity during off-peak periods. Screenshots 1 and 2 use data based on the following variables:

OffPeak:0.0693,Day:0.2131

Weekday & Weekend Start Times
0:0,5:1,13:0,16:1,20:0,22:1

The screens shots show, as expected, that most of the use is in the Off-peak periods.

In the new instance of the app I changed the Start Times to reflect my use in BST:

Weekday & Weekend Start Times
1:0,6:1,14:0,17:1,21:0,23:1
(I also tried starting from 0, i.e 0:0, 6:1,… but the result is the same)
I would have expected the screenshots to show similar results to the two above, but the Day usage is greater than the Off-peak, which does not look right. I don’t think I have entered the times incorrectly, and I have checked that it is not a caching/refresh issue. Any thoughts?

It does reflect the oddness I saw when I tested having a different timezone in my browser (ie. the PC used for viewing the app) to the timezone defined in emoncms. It looks like the daily usage numbers in the first screenshot almost match the power graph in the second and vice-versa?

When you define the start times, you should always start at 0, so if you’re “Day” is between 10pm and midnight GMT and you wanted to shift everything by an hour, add 0:1 to the start of the updated definition:
0:1,1:0,6:1,14:0,17:1,21:0,23:1

I don’t think that will make much (if any) difference to the issue you see though

As TrystanLea pointed out, the API call used for the daily graphs uses the emoncms timezone in its calculations, whereas the power detail graph uses the browser timezone. I did start looking at doing the daily usage graph differently (essentially using the same API call being used by the detail graph), but my day job got in the way. That change should fix the daily use to at least match the power detail graph.

I might get a chance to look at it in the next day or so (I think I was almost done re-writing it), I’ll re-post here when I do.

The only difference is that for screenshots 3 & 4 I have advanced my tier start times by 1 hour, so screenshot 3 &4 should should show similar results to screenshots 1 &2. The power graphs display correctly; it is the bar chart (screenshot 3) that is awry - I would expect it to be showing an even higher reading for off-peak use (>80%) than can be seen in screenshot 1, but instead it is showing around 50%.

Sorry, I just realised I wasn’t clear in my response, I had assumed (incorrectly) 2 screenshots in your post when obviously there has to be 4!

Should have said:
It looks like the daily usage numbers in the first screenshot almost match the power graph in the 4th screenshot and the daily usage numbers from the 3rd screenshot match the power graph in the 2nd screenshot?

The 3rd and 2nd screenshots are closer, but looking at the second, I would still expect the off-peak use (light blue) to be significantly greater than the Day (dark blue). But the third screenshot is definitely paired with the fourth screenshot anyway - I have not muddled the screenshots up! The power graphs are displaying correctly, so one would expect the first screenshot to look similar to the fourth, although the off-peak use should be even less. The problem is that the bar graph data in screenshot 3 does not reflect the usage as displayed in the screenshot 4 power graph. In both sets the underlying usage data is the same: all that has changed is the times for the tiers. The data in the powergraphs is from the Aug 15 bar in both cases.

Hello

I have a suggestion. If can be possible configure the off peak period for each week day,

Example, in Portugal the sunday its a off peak day (0-24h), I can’t configure that ( I think)

[See V1.1.0 App module stable release: New Time-of-use app - #4 by Nuno_Araujo - Moderator (RW) ]

Good day,

I am not sure who to speak to but I am also interested in having Sunday as an offpeak day. Here in South Africa our tier times changes in winter and summer but this winter (June -August) our times is as follows:

Tier names and costs:
OffPeak: 0.8003, Standard: 1.3976, Peak:3.6469

Weekday Tier Start Times: 0:0, 6:2, 9:1, 17:2, 19:1, 22:0
Saturday Tier Start Times: 0:0, 7:1, 12:0, 18:1, 20:0
Sunday Tier Start Times: 0:0

Public Holidays does not affect the tier start times.

Will someone please help me to achieve this?