I’m researching open source gear for monitoring & managing energy systems in a SEED Eco-Home, solar tiny house, or other homestead buildings. Your emonPi looks very promising, and I am building a list of technical questions to help me with suitability & cost to implement.
High on my list of questions has to do with monitoring the performance of the Hydronic Stove Heating and Solar PV Electrical systems in the current SEED Eco-Home (see Seed Eco-Home Features - Open Source Ecology) and if you want to see video presentations on the installed systems check out:
Hydronic Stove Seed Eco-Home Hydronic Stove Walk-Through - YouTube
PV System Seed Eco-Home PV System - YouTube
The SEED Eco-Home’s low-cost, diy heating and electrical power systems are very innovative and potentially a good model for 21st century homesteaders on a budget. Understanding how the emonPi, emonTX, emonTH, and other sensors could be integrated into the SEED Eco-Home’s energy systems for both monitoring and performance analysis is my first research goal.
My second research goal is to understand how your gear could be incorporated into a multi-building, multi-system homestead environmental monitoring & control system by integration into OpenHAB, NodeRED, MQTT, and other home automation technologies. The need would be to monitor & control systems like greenhouse, aquaculture, biogas digester, rainwater collection & processing, multi-fuel heating system, solar PV & grid tie power, solar hot air & CSP systems, thermal storage, security & surveillance, WLAN, and other applications.
So far it has been really exciting to see what you folks have accomplished! Now I have to do my due diligence to see if you have the solution that we would recommend to others and deploy ourselves on our own homestead. (A couple of other diy MacGyver types have joined me in learning about Raspberry Pi, Arduino, emonPi, EmonCMS, OpenHAB, Node-RED, MQTT, and creating monitoring & automation systems to solve homesteading problems. One of the guys is looking at creating an automatic chicken coop gate closer, after losing some chickens to a bobcat while he was in town!)
So we’re looking to dive in an see what we can implement…