Thanks for the quick reply, ergy I guess is just another way to see your energy data. Current cost data is sent to ergy along with z-wave energy data and comprised together along with being broken up into separate devices. In the settings you can see the current cost device along with its temperature data. You can also see z-wave devices and choose if they are part of the whole house or renewable energy.
I have 2 transmitters in my system one of course is the whole house and another is solar array. I have used your formula to minus the solar of the whole house very successfully. But the transmitters in current cost do not show up in the power meter section of ergy, so I can choose the renewable energy.
I have attached some screen shot to help with my terrible descriptions.
I see what you mean. The child devices are just ignored. I’m going to have to ask one of the MCV people about it; perhaps there’s some special flag that I need to set on devices with my plugin. ERGY is a closed ecosystem so I doubt I’ll figure it out with experimentation alone. Thanks for the screenshots.
I am very new to the home automation and even I do not have any controller yet but I believe that Vera light is the one I am looking for.
I am living in UK and just recently install PV solar panels (2.85 kWpeak). I have so called dual electrical supply installation which means that cables from solar panels and from grid meet in my distribution (fuse) box.
Primarily I am using electricity produced by solar panels and topped up by electricity from the grid when needed.
On other side the excess electricity produced by solar panels during the day is feeded in to a national grid.
Basically I am looking for the controller which would measure, monitor, evaluate and trigger some action (switch on/off plugs) based on amount of excess electricity produced by solar panels.
I was searching on the internet and came across Vera controller and this forum. I’ve read carefully this thread and particularly from your discussion I believe that Vera is capable of doing what I am looking for.
I have EnviR Current Cost energy monitor with two transmitters and I am monitoring whole house consumption and solar panels productions.
I understand that it may not be straightforward to connect EnviR to Vera but it should be feasible. I have seen that one can manipulate the data (subtract) so I it should be possible to monitor the electricity excess. Based on this assumption I would like to control / trigger actions like:
if there is excess of let say 500 W switch on appliance1 (hot water tank)
if there is still excess of 200 W switch on appliance2…
if the excess drops down to 0 switch off step by stem individual appliances controlling continuously excess electricity
Obviously I hope that all this would be possible to monitor either on that web based application or even better on Android mobile application.
Sorry for my rather long and may be not very clear explanation but I would like to hear your opinion whether it is feasible since I’ve found your posts to be the closest what I want to do.
Yes, I think that will work. There are events already on the plugin that will fire if the measured power goes over or under a certain number of watts. You can write code (about ten lines of Lua) that will turn on or off other appliances when those events fire. Having them cascade, so that Appliance 2 only comes on if Appliance 1 is already on, will complicate the code only a little, I think. You will also want to build in some hysteresis so that you aren’t cycling the appliances too quickly whenever there is a sunny break.
I haven’t personally tried the above, because where I come from the feed-in tariffs make it more economical just to sell the excess back to the grid.
thanks for your prompt replay! It sounds really very encouraging and I am almost decided to go for Vera light.
I am just hoping that I can get some help from you if I am stuck either with connecting EnviR monitor or later on with some other configurations.
Couple of more general question: Would I be able to see a graph with current consumption and production on the web / Android? Is it possible to override manually operations controlled by Vera? Would you recommend any particular appliance plug or be aware about some features?
Obviously I do not want any kind of appliance to start to switch on and off if the electricity excess oscillates very quickly around pre-set value. I hope there is some threshold value (let say +/- 50 W) to set up triggering action.
Sorry for bombarding you by so many questions but I would like to be kind of sure before I purchase anything.
By the way FIT tariff in UK works in a way that I am paid for every kWh solar panels produce whether I use it at home or feed into a grid. I am paid also some small extra money for electricity feeded into a grid but since there are no smart energy meters yet Energy supplier companies assume that home usage is 50% of solar panels productions which is well above what I am currently able to use at home.
Here on the forum is where I do my support for this plugin, so if you hit any problem, just ask.
Would I be able to see a graph with current consumption and production on the web / Android?
The plugin itself doesn’t do those things, because they are already done better with other tools. There is basic monitoring with graphing through Micasaverde’s own web portal. There’s the official third-party ERGY plugin that you can also access through the web portal. There’s dataMine, a bells-and-whistles add-on that plots any variable that Vera produces.
Android support would be better answered by the developers of their respective applications. They have their own forum sections that the authors read. AFAIK neither AutHomation nor HomeBuddy display instantaneous usage yet, but they could; it’s just a Simple Matter of Programming. Edit: From version 25 of this plugin, instantaneous power displays in AutHomation.
Is it possible to override manually operations controlled by Vera?
Sorry, I don’t know what you mean. If you’re talking about being able to force on/off your water heater regardless of the solar panel output, yes, that’s possible, with programming. You just have to be able to sufficiently define the behaviour that you want, so that a program on the Vera can run it. Most likely, you will want to have a switch on the Vera control panel (“Auto”/“Manual”), and the automatic behaviour kicks in when the switch is in the appropriate position. Around here we call these kinds of switches “virtual switches”.
Would you recommend any particular appliance plug or be aware about some features?
The appliance switches sold in my part of the world won’t be the same as the ones sold in your part, so I can’t usefully recommend one. But it shouldn’t matter: any appliance switch should suffice for your needs. All the appliance switches here measure power for their connected appliance’s usage too, which is a nice bonus; I don’t know how universal that is.
Obviously I do not want any kind of appliance to start to switch on and off if the electricity excess oscillates very quickly around pre-set value. I hope there is some threshold value (let say +/- 50 W) to set up triggering action.
You would have to write code to do this, but it wouldn’t be particularly difficult. If you’ve ever programmed before, you will figure it out. If not, we can tag-team-code here on the forum. Others will want to do similar things so it pays to share the knowledge.
Hi Futzle and all,
I just buy a Currentcost EnviR and it works well with the Vera. I just have a pair of questions : is it a way to get data from the EnviR like the power from the last hour, or last 2 hours, or last day …
The result will be put in a VContainer device for example : one variable for the 7 am to 11 pm tariff, another one for the other tariff and a last one for the totality.
Is it possible ?
Thanks for your answer and sorry for my english if you don’t understand all.
The last hour: not easily. Cumulative power data (actually energy, not power) is collected only in two-hour blocks. You might be able to use Vera’s own accumulation code, which you can see in the “Log” variable in the Advanced tab. This won’t be easy.
For longer periods, you can query the same data that makes the history graphs. Copy the text out of the TwoHourlyHistory variable and you can see its format: hhh=vvv.v where hhh is the number of hours ago and vvv.v is the kWh used in that period. If you write Lua code you can break apart this string and pull out the numbers to add them up. Be aware that this data is always at least two hours out of date.
For the moment, I am not planning to add such a feature to the plugin, but the information is there if you want to take a stab at programming it yourself.
Thank you for your return.
I will try to question theTwoHourlyHistory variable in a lua code.
Just a question:
Be aware that this data is always at least two hours out of date.
if I make a script which is executed at 10 p.m. for example, it is not sure that the variable hhh = 002 is 8 p.m. How to know the approximate hour of the statement hhh = 002?
Did you find the secret colouring feature for the history graphs?
I used the colours for the graph and that functions very well!!
There’s a variable HistoryUpdateTimestamp which contains the time that the hours are relative to. It is in UNIX epoch format, which Lua understands. Round it up to the next boundary of 2n+1 hours: that’s hour “000”. Entry “002” doesn’t exist, but entry “004” does. Example: at 10 pm the “004” entry is electricity used from 7 pm to 9 pm.
with all this invaluable help, I should manage to make a script which meets my need.
If there are some who are interested, I will diffuse it.
Thank you.
Hi
I’m using your excellent plugin for a few weeks and really enjoying it…
Two questions
Is it possible to update it from 17 to the latest (20) on the apps.mios.com?
When my PV plant generating more solar electricity than imported from a grid (i.e. I’m exporting electricity back :)) ), it looks like (global balance ) a bit ugly (I’m using simple formula 0-1)
Screenshot is attached…
Sure, I’ll try to update it over Easter I’ve submitted version 25 for approval. YouEveryone will need to be on firmware 1.5.322 or later.
When my PV plant generating more solar electricity than imported from a grid (i.e. I'm exporting electricity back :)) ), it looks like (global balance :) ) a bit ugly (I'm using simple formula 0-1)
Screenshot is attached...
Down the bottom left? That’s MCV’s code. I will raise a bug report with them and point to your screenshot.
I bet no one else has a big enough PV system to have generated the five digits needed to trigger it (mine is only 4 kW).
Hi Futzle, I asked this same question a few months ago but couldn’t find the answer.
Is it possible to connect the Envir to Vera through Ethernet using the bridge. I think it is easier that way because using the USB cable means that you need to put the display near Vera and that isn’t alway the best option…
Not as the plugin is written. The bridge (I have one, but it’s never been removed from the box) is programmed to upload your data to CurrentCost’s servers, and to my knowledge it doesn’t expose the data on the LAN at all.
I imagine that it would be possible to scrape the data off the CurrentCost website and re-inject it into Vera as a power meter. Enough of the code would be different that now we are talking about a different, not-yet-written, plugin.
Or you could put a small USB-to-Ethernet converting device near the display console, and the plugin would connect over a serial proxy. That already works, and it’s what I do. For me, the “small USB-to-Ethernet device” is a Mac mini, but anything smaller capable of running ser2net would do (Raspberry Pi?). I even see that people have been reprogramming the CurrentCost bridge. Know any Arduino programming?
Ouch! I’m the developer of the plugin and I’m shocked that the plugin had that effect. Can you work with me to identify what is unique about your setup, so that others don’t suffer the same fate? PM me or post to this thread.
I hope this information helps. I am using a Veralite running firmware version 1.5.346. Everything was working perfect until I loaded the Current Cost energy app and during this load the Veralite GUI interface just appeared to be loading the app for hours and the blue and green lights would cycle on/off during this time. I could select different menu tabs but none of them would respond to anything. I found a post talking about restoring it back to factory defaults an was able to get that done but when I to restore my setting by selecting backup and then selecting one of my backup files from my computer it fails with a error that it can’t uncompress my backup file. The Veralite backup was used to make this backup so why can’t it use it? I can uncompress the file locally on my HD so the file appears to be fine.
Hopefully that gives you more information to work with. I have it working again my question is what is wrong with the restore process? Defaulting to factory and reconfiguring from scratch each time a app install fails is crazy.
