Home Energy Monitoring

Real time energy display using Meniscus Widget


Objective

This is a fully automated Home Energy Monitoring process to setup and then display the output from a Current Cost Home Energy Monitor. Displays real time data for up to 12 appliances and provides a comprehensive set of data analysis tools to allow users to visualise their costs and use.

This solution monitors thousands of electricity monitors from all around the world. It is built using the Meniscus Calculation Engine – MCE

Configuration and set up

This is a free service developed for users of the Current Cost Home Energy Monitor.

The whole process of setting up this Home Energy Monitoring system is fully automated. On registration, all the raw and calculated items (over 50 in total) are created for the user. A free app or a re-purposed current cost bridge unit (Arduino board) can be used to upload data to the Meniscus servers. With this app, this uploads a data file containing 6-second data every minute whilst the bridge uploads one aggregated value every two minutes.

The solution can use the MCE Widgets and this is an example MCE widget dashboard

Range of graphs available on our Home Energy Monitoring IE Silverlight dashboard
  • Real Time display for all your data feeds. Updated every two minutes and shows 6-second data. Shows last hour or last day’s data
  • Pie chart of consumption for each channel
  • Meter Comparison graph. Compare data from different data feeds and calculations
  • Time comparison graph. Compare performance of a data feed or calculation over different time ranges
  • Season average graph. Shows today’s half hour electricity use compared to your own average for the same day type (weekday, Saturday or Sunday) and the same Season (Summer, Winter etc).
  • Actual cost compared to target and shows total savings
  • Billing summary comparing actual meter use to estimated use from the device
  • Actual electricity costs using complex multi-rate costs of electricity
  • Set up pages. Set up multi-rate electricity costs, targets, benchmarks, e-mail alerts, API key for using the Meniscus widgets graphs
  • Site summary. Summarises your electricity use in one table
Calculated values available in the Home Energy Monitoring dashboard:
  • Total half hour electricity use (sum of the three channels)
  • Total daily electricity use (sum of the three channels)
  • Total carbon use
  • Electricity cost for each channel and total – using a daily average unit cost
  • Target use based initially on historic comparison – but looking to use external temperature and sunset data as well
  • Baseline consumption
  • Seasonal and day type average use – i.e. Average winter weekday use
  • Ratio of baseline uses to actual use
  • Potential annual savings with 10% reduction in baseline consumption
  • Additional calculations are set up depending on the local tariff rate that can be configured in the dashboard. Configurable tariffs include:
    • Single Rate
    • Economy 7 (day/ night split)
    • Economy 7 tiered (different rate once a certain monthly volume of consumption has been met)
    • Multi-Rate (different day/night rates for weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays)
    • Monthly tiered (different rate once a certain monthly volume of consumption has been met
Benefits of using Meniscus Calculation Engine

The Calculation Engine allows the complete automation of the setup process using the user registration as the initiating process. The whole system is automated with all calculations automatically configured and any variables made available for change from the dashboard using the RESTful API.