OpenEnergyMonitor Meetup

We had a very enjoyable OpenEnergyMonitor meetup last weekend. Ken Boak and Paul Allen (MarsFlyer)  came up from London, Matt Fawcett from Manchester and Carlos Alonso Gabizó from Machynlleth.

Controlling wireless nodes from emoncms
Ken Boak and I worked on furthering a way for emoncms to be able to send commands back to the gateway and wireless nodes, which could be used as part of a system for turning on and off heating systems and setting set point temperatures. There's now a new optional emoncms module called command where you can add commands to a queue that can then be requested by the gateway. Download the module here: https://github.com/emoncms/command

Gas monitoring 
There was a lot of discussion around gas monitoring. Paul brought with him a jeenode with a hall effect sensor connected for sensing the magnetic pulse given off by certain types of gas meter. The jeenode goes to sleep between pulses so that it can run on a single AA battery for a long time which is a big benefit for installations where there are no near electrical sockets. Glyn worked on adding this to the gas monitoring page on the website here: http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/buildingblocks/gas-meter-monitoring

Paul also implemented a pulse to power input processor for emoncms to allow conversion of pulse data coresponding to energy use increments to power values for use with the low power gas pulse counter.

Carlos replicated the EmonTx accuracy experiment, with the results comparing well with the previous investigation take a look at his results here http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/emontx/accuracy

An open source SAP calculator - Matt and I made a start on an open source web based SAP worksheet - SAP is the UK Government’s Standard Assessment Procedure for Energy Rating of Dwellings produced by BRE the Building Research Establishment. We've put the progress we have made so far up on github here: https://github.com/emoncms/sap 

Please get in touch if your interested in helping to develop this, we could do with more help with completing the form and checking and implementing the remaining calculations.

Matt is working on a really exciting project in Manchester with Carbon Coop to do building retrofits of which monitoring and sap calculation is an important part, its well worth a look at their work here http://carbon.coop/

We also looked at humidity sensing and built up a couple of low-power wireless humidity nodes using an emonTx's with a DHT22 humidity sensor.

Throughout the weekend I think we had a good emphasis on how the tools that we are developing are applied with much discussion of how it all fits into the wider picture of sustainable energy. 

It was a great weekend and I'm really looking forward to the next one already, we're thinking maybe next April on a bank holiday weekend.