I,
i’m a little confuse with all the post that i saw here, i just want to monitor my home energy consumption with 2 clamp in my electrical box, the aeon DSB09104-ZWUS price is very low and seams to be plug and play with the vera. the ted and the current cost envis seams to be less cheap and have a good display to, however, it seams to be more complex to install to the vera and the enrgy plugin seams not to be compatible. I have a vera lite with a insteon modem for the rest of my x10 device. if i go with the usb method, could a powered usb hub work with it?
Mic, you should be fine with a USB hub. Powered hubs are a good idea; the CurrentCost cable wants to draw a fair bit of power for the chip that’s buried in one end of it.
Clamp-only energy monitors perform spectacularly badly on some kinds of load (fridges that tend to be inductive; solar inverters that tend to be capacitive). In the average house these don’t dominate, so your readings will usually be within 10% of what your meter reads. The CurrentCost is a clamp-only design. I think the Aeon one is too. The TED5000 apparently has additional cables to measure voltage, so it won’t suffer from nearly the same inaccuracy. But that makes it harder to install…
Right, it connects to your circuit breakers, and besides measuring voltage and powering the box (MTU), injects the measurement data, which is then picked up by the Gateway. It may require several attempts to get the power line communication established properly.
I have the TED5000 system in my home, and it works very well.
Yes, it did take a bit of work to get the communications between the MTU’s and the Gateway “just right” (they use powerline communications like x-10), but once I got everything perfect, it works like a charm.
I use mine to monitor the entire house, my solar array, and other things. Of course it won’t be 100% accurate as compared to the electrical meter, but it’s MUCH MUCH MUCH better than nothing, and has allowed me to come up with an amazing amount of savings off my utility bill.
I highly recommend the system. Just keep in mind that it’s not exactly plug and play.
All the plugin-based Energy monitors report their data up to Vera. This can be viewed, even in either UI4 or UI5, using the MiOS Graphing stuff (Energy → Usage).
This definitely works for the Brultech plugin, so I suspect it works equally as well for the CurrentCost and TED5000 Plugins (since they all leverage the same mechanism)
You don’t need the ERGY stuff at all for basic analysis.
I have 14 channels wired into the Panel, and all the tuning has been done with these built-in graphs… In contrast, ERGY never seemed to work, and then they weren’t careful in data handling so that was the final straw…
For basic everyday system monitoring, the TED 5000 plugin for Vera works perfectly. For graphing and more detailed information, I use Ted’s built in web server.