Hello!
Thank you for this great project. I’m planning on setting up power monitoring in my house. I’m located in the US and I have a 3phase power supply(208y/120) so that means I’d need 3 CT sensors. It looks like emonTx supports that. And it also seems like it needs the emonBase station. I also already run few home automation things using both a dedicated linux host, as well as RPis. So the main question is: Is it possible to interface emonTx with existing devices and add a 433 mhz radio to them? Or is there some other alternative? I’d like to avoid buying two devices.
Thank you!
Welcome, Vitaliy, to the OEM forum.
Indeed it does. Check the size of your service entrance wires before you order the c.t’s. Our YHDC SCT-013-000 can only accept a cable up to ½" diameter, above that you’ll need a different c.t. There’s a list of those we know about and have checked here: Learn→Electricity Monitoring→AC Power Theory→Use in North America→Use in North America
(But most of that page is about the split-phase supply, which won’t help you much.)
You’ll need a programmer because you must have the 3-phase sketch loaded into your emonTx.
Maybe. The recommendation from the RPi experts is that you should use a dedicated machine for emonCMS - assuming you want to use that. If you don’t, and there’s a RPi with a spare serial input close by, you can forget the radio and connect serially, or if not you can add the RFM69Pi https://shop.openenergymonitor.com/rfm69pi-433mhz-raspberry-pi-base-station-transceiver/ to your existing RPi - and that delivers the data to the serial port too. Or if none of those, you can add an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module to the emonTx and go straight into your LAN.
You might be able to run emonCMS on your Linux host, if you want, rather than on a RPi (though the RPI will be the easy route as emonCMS and the OS are available for download - copy to SD card and run).
My colleague @Bill.Thomson is in the US, so he’s (relatively) local and knows the US electrical system. He might be better placed to help you.
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