re: Am I allowed to attach things to my utility meters?

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I do a lot of automation stuff for a living.

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Oh cool, what kind of gear do you deal with?

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I'm pretty sure I could rig up a bad arse central control and monitoring system for not much money at all.

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I don't know if anything can beat Home Assistant for the price (free plus cost of hardware). And so far it can do anything I've been able to think of. HA (central control) + ESPHome (sensors and output) + WLED (LED strips) is an awesome combo.

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Simple stuff. PLCs and modbus mostly.

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At the end of the day your scada systems and PLCs and all of these industrial things are doing the same exact things that home automation systems are doing: taking inputs and generating outputs. By using the I/O pins on a Raspberry Pi or ESP board or whatever, you've basically made a PLC. There are even various software packages and OS's designed specifically to make programming them similar to a typical PLC. And Home Assistant is essentially scada, it collects data and it will take action automatically or you can flip switches manually.

The only real difference I guess is industrial systems go through rigorous reliability testing and such, while I'm using controllers that I buy 5 at a time for $6/EA.

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My only interest right now is trending temperatures in the house so I can prove to my wife that she's not being efficient with AC vs Heat usage

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Braver man than me. Best of luck!

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I'm basically "industrializing" my house a little bit at a time, end goal is to have something similar to how a plant would be set up.

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Hell yeah same here.

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Wireless temp sensors in the refrigerators

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The main problem here is the low temps kill battery life. I have a temp probe in my chest freezer because when my last one went out I lost some food, but I have the controller outside of it so it's plugged into the wall.

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main feed amps

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There are a lot of products for this but most of them are cloud based which I hate. I'm using IoTaWatt which is open software and hardware, can work as a standalone data logger which you can access via web browser, or you can configure it to feed the data to a cloud database of your choice or directly to Home Assistant on your local network. It also has 14 inputs so you can monitor the mains plus individual circuits. I believe there's one called Emporia which is similar and a bit cheaper. That one is cloud based but I think you can flash the firmware for local control. They use the same ESP chips that are on my little dev boards. You can even DIY a power monitor with one of these boards, some split core CT's, and misc additional components.

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I didn't realize these cheap flow meters you mentioned existed. Definitely going to incorporate that.

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Pretty cool stuff. They don't measure flow directly, rather they just count pulses or alternating magnetic waves emitted by the actual meters. I'm not sure if these meter emissions are intentional or just a side-effect, but it works.

IDK but the gas people at entergy and their subs are incompetent.

Last winter they were "upgrading" to the new meter and send out the sub to alert us. What did they do? they left a note on our door thursday saying the new meter would be installed tuesday, turned off our gas, and locked the meter. This was the weekend of the freeze last year and i have gas heat.

I got on the phone with entergy and the incompetence of one of their Customer service reps was shocking. After explaining what is going on, and saying the freeze is coming, i needed the valve unlocked. He did not know what was going on and said there was nothing he could do... It escalated and i told him i was going to go cut the lock off and he threatened me with some shite law shite. I told him i did not give a frick, and i would sue them for cutting off my gas before a freeze for "upgrades", and that i would sue him personally. He ended up hanging up on me.

I was fuming and walking to go get my grinder and decided to call one more time... And the neve rep was fantastic and got one of their techs out in 1 hour. I which i had his name to give him some praise to his supervisor.




Long story short, entergy sucks.

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Where can I gain knowledge of what you are doing? YouTube?

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If all you want to do is monitor a freezer, I would probably buy a freezer monitor on Amazon. There are a few wifi connected ones that will alert your phone of high temps.

I take the DIY approach because I built mine for $10 vs. the ~$80 device on Amazon, and I can make mine work the way I want. For example, for another $10 on mine I added a split core current transformer to measure the power draw of the freezer. This gave me runtime data as well, so I have notifications configured for if it starts drawing more current than usual or if it starts running for a long time. I could also add a second temp probe and strap it to the compressor to see if it starts running hot. My thinking is I can hopefully detect some early signs of failure maybe days or weeks before the freezer actually stops cooling.

So yeah there's a lot on YouTube for all this stuff, but I usually follow tutorials found on DIY sites. Obviously it helps to have some foundational knowledge or awareness of what is out there, otherwise you don't know what to search for.

I am actually gearing up to make some videos about the stuff I tinker with, so if you're still interested I'll make one for the freezer monitor and let you know when I upload it. I'm not going to spam TD, so you can email me at my username at gmail.

I have not yet finished this project, but I wanted to post a quick update on my progress. Hopefully this will make it more clear what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.


Here is a photo of the device sitting on top of the gas meter, powered by a portable usb charger:



And here is the magnetometer dangling down the back side of the meter:



You are looking at $10 worth of parts.

This is obviously a temporary setup for testing purposes, and placement of the sensor is not ideal, but here is a sample of the data I'm getting anyway:




Absolutely beautiful! Just hanging out back there the magnetometer is picking up useful differences in field strength as the meter spins.

Looking at the chart:

4:37 Placed the device on the meter
4:38 Lit big burner on stove
4:40 Lit *all* the burners on the stove
4:42 Turned off stove

After 4:42 is the slow background gas consumption of the various pilot lights in the house (plus any small leakage I guess), which by the way looks to be 2 cubic foot burned per hour or nearly 1,500 per month. If my math is correct it costs me nearly $20/month just to keep pilots lit! That sounds like a handy figure to know when considering switching from gas to electric (or going tankless).

According to my eyeball calibration watching the chart and the dial, 8 high-low cycles on my chart equals 1 cubic foot of gas. Next step is to work on the code to count cycles instead of just reporting the raw data. Once I'm counting cycles it's trivial to convert to realtime/hourly/daily consumption rates, perhaps even reported in dollars. Then of course I need to put it in a watertight enclosure and mount it to the side of the house with a small solar panel.

I have other projects in the works of similarly low cost to gather data on water heater temps. That in conjunction with the data I already have from my smart thermostats will allow me to set up automations which can trigger excess gas consumption when neither the water heaters nor the furnaces are running. As of now this would trigger whenever I run the stove or the gas fireplace, but I can also develop devices to detect the state of these appliances as well.


Maybe all of this is mostly pointless, but for me it was the missing piece in monitoring all my utility consumption. Electricity and water have commercial options that are reasonably priced, but I couldn't find anything for gas so I built it. I think at least a few people in the world would find it useful, maybe restaurants or other small businesses that might like to keep an eye on their gas consumption.

IoTaWatt, but it was a tough call between that one and the cheaper Emporia unit. Both of them can measure the mains plus multiple individual circuits.