Automated Power Recording

This post continues on the post from 12 of January[0].

With the PV connected to the grid, I wanted to ensure what power is injected. For this I used a power meter with an LCD. This is a nice way to see what’s the power of the given moment or the power overall. However, this is quite some effort to do. Every day, I have to write down what the value was and the position of the socket was everything but user-friendly. Additionally, to this, there was the problem of not being always around. I went to camp and wasn’t home to write down the recorded power.

So I had some time to think about how to cope with this. For another idea of mine I’ve checkout something called smart sockets:

These are some small chips with a giant relay attach to it. It allows to power up or down a connected device. In the image we can see a power socket we toyed around during the CCCamp. The problem with many of these sockets is the vendor have created a cheap device, that can only be operated by them via the cloud, and even the basic server operation isn’t ensured.

Instead, I decided to search for a privacy-friendly alternative that might also include power metering. I found this one:

A TP-Link HS-110 with a power meter included. The best part is, that you do not need to put them online. You can control the entry thing locally. There is a good YouTube video of the disassembling of the given devices to option a better understanding of the device:

To read data from the project you can use this GitHub project[1] that allows to send commands to the devices within you local network.

so far,
Akendo

[0] https://blog.akendo.eu/post/2021-01-12-pv-power-recording/ [1] https://github.com/softScheck/tplink-smartplug