Questions about Brultech Energy Meters

Other Devices & Integrations Power Management
1

guessed,
I have a couple of simple brultech questions that you may be able to help me with. I’m going for a low-budget monitoring of a few circuits and so a single ECM-1240 should do me fine. Also, I will pull an ethernet cable for it for a wired connection to my laptop. My laptop is connected to the home network (DSL modem) via wi-fi and I’m wondering if having a wired connection to the laptop’s ethernet port would cause any problems. Wouldn’t the 1240 just show up as another networked device?

Secondly, I can’t really tell from the screen shots at brultech exactly what info I could get using their dashboard software. I would just need monthly kwh for a few appliances and I assume data this basic should be available on the dashboard. Is that a good assumption?

I’ve sent emails to the sales brultech but they are apparently very slow to respond. Must be very busy. :slight_smile:

Thanks much for any help

Eric

2

If you’re literally connecting one end of the Ethernet Cable to the Brultech (via like a WIZnet RS232 ↔ Ethernet adapter, for example) and the other end is going directly into your Laptop, then you’re going to need to configure your PC to deal with that situation correctly.

On a Mac, for example, this is done using the Internet-sharing option, and there’s something similar on a Windows box.

Alternatively, pull the Ethernet cable directly to the DSL unit/Router.

In my config, I have the EtherBee and each of my ECM-1240’s have the ZigBee radios inside. It’s more expensive, but I can now run without [low voltage] Ethernet Cabling anywhere near my power box (check local construction codes when you’re doing this)

I don’t use the Brultech Software, and never have, so I cannot comment on how well it works. In my setup I have a MiOS Plugin that I’ve written to get the data into Vera, so I completely avoid having a PC running 24x7 for datalogging. I get crude historical graphs from MiOS’s server infrastructure.

I don’t have any graphs running locally, but will add @Chris’s DataMine plugin to get those eventually (or offload it to a low-power Plug Computer I have)

I've sent emails to the sales brultech but they are apparently very slow to respond. Must be very busy. :)
Yes, they're revving a new piece of Hardware, called the GreenEye, which has 32 Channels, a native WiFi option, and a bunch more inputs for other stuff. I imagine they're quite busy right now since it's supposed to be released this month.

Your best bet for this stuff is their Forum. Ben tends to respond to that more since any question responded to will help everyone reading the Forums.

PS: I split out this post from the Aeon clamp thread, as I didn’t want to hijack it.