Chris Bergeron's Blog

My projects, rants and general info

Posts Tagged ‘solar’

Solar: Update 2

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Tracking electricity usage is an important component of solar power. In order to help me achieve this goal, I wrote some software to help me monitor my electricity usage. Each month when the electric bill arrives, I input the data into an iPhone applet. This applet records the data into a database. I’m not going to link to it for privacy reasons, but here’s a picture of the applet:


Here are a couple of graphs produced from it. The first are the bill amounts:
Bill amounts

The second is the number of kiloWatt hours used:
kWh used

Here’s the latest data (as of Sunday 20th of May 2012 10:08:18 AM):

  • 58 months of data
  • 50,592 kiloWatt hours used totalling: $USD 6,107.35. This equates to a practical average price per watt of: $USD 0.12 (including base charges and tax)
  • Average bill amount: $USD 105.30
  • Average kWh per month: 872

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Solar: Update 1

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I just talked to my local utility, Sawnee EMC, and they’ve removed the administrative fees and meter rental fees associated with a net metered solar installation. A couple of years ago, when I was in the early planning stages of using solar, there was a $50/month admin. fee and a $12/month rental fee. These fees alone would have cost more per month than the savings from a 2kW solar array. Now that they’ve removed these fees, switching to solar is making even more financial sense. Also, instead of having to rely on my own battery array during darkness, I can use utility power via a net-metering capable meter. Great news!

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Reading data from Itron Centron, and openAMR

Monday, July 27th, 2009

In anticipation of installing a Solar Array at home (someday), I’m going to need to monitor my power usage more accurately. I’ve created a worksheet to approximate my power usage, but I need more solid data. So, I’m going to need to read data directly from the Itron Centron CL200 meter. It uses ANSI C12.19 and C12.22 standards for transmitting data, so I should be able to tap into it after I familiarize myself with the specs. The CL200 also transmits watt-hour usage via infrared pulses on the top of the meter. It seems that the meter transmits 1 pulse for every watt hour of usage, so in the near-term I’m going to have to build a circuit to read this data. Once I’m able to read the data, I can begin analyzing it and I’ll post it (along with graphs) on this site.


Fortunately, there’s already an existing open-source project dedicated to Automated Meter Reading(AMR): OpenAMR

Another blogger is also working on a similar project. His page can be found here: http://davestech.blogspot.com/2008/02/itron-remote-read-electric-meter.html

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