Power consumption of iotawatt

Hardware IoTaWatt
1

Hello all.
Iottawatt user here from Pakistan :).
I am waiting for my iotawatt to be delivered.

Brief summary:
I was wondering if any one has figured out the power consumption of iotawatt. My usecase includes using a battery to power the iotawatt. I am trying to figure out how long usage I can squeeze out of a 10000mAh or similar battery.

Explanation:
I will be using the iotawatt to measure my energy consumption. However in my place, we lose main power for a few hours every day. Usually 2-3 hrs for 3 times a day. It varies b/w summer and winter.
So I was thinking power cycling the iotawatt so many times a day can’t be good. There is a good chance the file system may got corrupted. The best way I figured around that was to connect it to a battery bank, and connect the battery bank to a USB power adapted. So when main fails, iotawatt will stay powered on. Now I need a ballpark figure of power consumption for iotawatt to figure out how big a power bank I am gonna need.

Any ideas ?

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2

Hi,

I dont know the power consumption but thought you may be interested in these DC UPS’s, i bought two of these, one for my fiber ONT and modem and the other to keep my IoTaWatt and Pi live in the event of a power cut. i have also got a multi voltage dc to USB converter to drop the power to 5v.

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3

The IoTaWatt power consumption as measured using a plug in AC monitor is 1.2W.

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4

Thanks for the link.
The solution does sound good. However, it adds bulk to the solution. I am trying keep everything within the junction box.
I will try to power it via USB battery bank and report back about the times I can get off of it.

5

Thanks. That sounds about right. I was thinking it would be somewhere south of 200mAh. Very rough calculation (I = 1.2W/5v = 240mAh). Considering the efficiency of AC-DC adapter, I suppose the actual current going to IotaWatt would be between 200 and 240mAh I suppose.

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6

I’m not in the lab at the moment. I’ll try and get some proper DC measurements when I’m back.

I think it will be less than that.

Have you @overeasy done any DC current consumption measurements of the IoTaWatt? It should be very similar to the consumption of the NodeMCU ERSP8266 since the ADC’s won’t use much. The ESP8266 WiFi will be the most power hungry part.

7

There are some other significant considerations beyond mAh that I would be happy to share in the IoTaWatt forum.