[TriLUG] remote power monitoring

[bradford powell via TriLUG]

If you just have one or a few devices to monitor that are less than 15A and
are willing to have a slightly-more work involved (which may be a plus or
minus...) then you might want to look into devices that are supported by
tasmota or espurna.

For instance, the sonoff S31 has a wifi version that uses an esp8266
internally for the wifi communication. While I think the default firmware
communicates with one or more cloud services (boo!), there are solder
points for the UART/serial on the board (hooray!), so you can open it up
(WITHOUT 110V POWER CONNECTED!), connect a usb-to-TTL serial adapter, and
replace the firmware with something like tasmota or espurna that will allow
you more control over where your data goes. Then you could just log the
data via something that sends a periodic "curl" to an address on the
device, or send messages or MQTT, or integrate with homeassistant...

https://tasmota.github.io/docs/devices/Sonoff-S31/ links to a video showing
the firmware replacement process. Once you do this initially, updating (or
switching from tasmota to espurna) can typically be done over-the-air, so
you wouldn't have to keep opening the device.

If you were to go the tasmota-wifi route, be careful that there is an "S31
Lite" that doesn't have power monitoring, and a zigbee version of the same,
so you'd have to make sure to get the right one. And the newer S40 uses a
different non-esp8266 chip so it's not supported by tasmota or espurna.

Or you could take the zigbee route, for which there are a number of similar
devices-- then if you had a non-cloud-linked zigbee hub you should be able
to keep everything local and avoid the opening-a-device part of things. I
don't have experience with zigbee to be able to comment on how they would
compare.

bp

On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 7:08 AM Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> I'm looking for a device, a bit like a kill-a-watt, that allows me to see
> how much power I'm using remotely (somewhere in the house), so I can plot
> it along with all my other graphs of things that are happening in the
> house and in my computers.
>
> It seems all the devices that do this, show the power on a cell phone app,
> or send the data to a server on the cloud (good luck when the company goes
> out of business), or to an Alexa. I want to be able to poll the device
> every 5 mins and ask for the data (current/power...) without using
> proprietary code.
>
> Thanks Joe
>
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> Don't upgrade a working machine - it won't work any
> better - it could work worse; it may not work at all.
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
>
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