Currently I’m using Home Assistant and Grafana for energy monitoring, but I’m missing some features there, particularly in the area of individual device monitoring. For example I would like to group devices into collapsible groups that are then shown as a sum or I would like to automatically add virtual “rest” devices for unmonitored devices that are calculated from floor input minus monitored devices.
So I was looking into alternatives and found emonCMS. But from reading the docs I don’t see any features that are tailored towards individual device monitoring.
Like sure, you can create one feed per device but even getting a breakdown like this one from Home Assistant seems hard with the data viewer in emonCMS:
You haven’t added in your profile where you are located in the world, so I’ll have to explain how emonCMS relates to the usual UK domestic wiring. We use what is officially described as a “final ring sub-circuit” - commonly a “ring main” - which will supply many socket outlets in a house. It is rated at 32 A. It could supply all the sockets, or there is often one ring circuit for each floor, or maybe the kitchen will have its own ring circuit. It’s only large fixed appliances, like cookers, electric showers, immersion heaters and car chargers that will have a dedicated circuit breaker. So in general terms, and because no-one has yet managed to detect individual appliances and extract their energy use from the total for a circuit - at least with any degree of certainty and reliably, we are generally unable to obtain the source data in the granularity that you seem to have.
That said, if you can provide emonCMS with the input values shown in your graph, then as part of the input processing, you can do (almost) as much adding and subtracting as you want, to group a number of inputs into a feed. I should explain an ‘input’ only exists immediately after the data arrives and until it is overwritten by the next sample. If, as part of the processing, you don’t save it to a ‘feed’ (the database) either immediately, at an intermediate stage in the processing or at the end, then the data is lost forever.
I think the answer to your final comment is - generally in the UK we cannot access the source data that you have where you live. There are ways - but they require an individual monitor to transmit the data for each socket outlet, and few people want to do this - so it can get very messy very quickly, and it’s only the data receiver and processor which you could install at a central location.
You can can log pretty much anything you like in emonCMS and do lots of processing on the data too. You might need to do a bit of lateral thinking to get them in there but it’s certainly possible. For instance I log a lot of data from my batteries. The basic data is collected by a Victron device, an instance of NodeRed sends the data to emonCMS, emonCMS then does things like converts the current and voltage to power and then energy so the input and output energy can be displayed. There are around 100 inputs and rather more than 100 feeds.
What I’ve never found a way of doing is displaying bars from multiple sources as you show in your illustration. You can show graphs with multiple feeds or bar charts with one feed or stacked bar charts but AFAIKS you can’t do multiple feeds visible individually as you have done. I’m happy to be proved wrong.
I threw this together in just a few minutes, so none of the colors, or other options have been set. i.e. they are at their “out-of-the-box” values/settings. The data itself, is real.
The downside to all this means either switching to Grafana, or running an instance of it in addition to emonCMS.
Just wanted to point out an option.
Speaking of options, here’s the “dark” version of the graph above:
I see, I didn’t realize that emonCMS is mainly developed in the UK and indeed I didn’t know that you guys use so few breakers.
For example in Germany one breaker also supplies more than one outlet, but there are usually a couple more breakers, typically one, two or three (lights, sockets front, sockets back) per room and then additional ones for certain consumers like dishwasher, fridge, water heaters, hob, etc.
I’m using Emporia Vue for the panel and then smart plugs for certain consumers in whose consumption I’m particularly interested.
I looked a bit more into this and it seems that most people with such hierarchical monitoring are using the Sankey chart card for Home Assistant.
The difference is, our plug also contains a fuse, either 3, 5, 10 or 13 A rating; it is this which provides the first level of over-current protection.
