Some interesting tweets by @isotopp and others on home power measurement and what to do to optimise energy usage at home
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/02/26
For my link archive (browse back and forth in the tweets: lots of useful tips):
[Wayback/Archive] Kris on Twitter: “@mausdompteur @HildebrandtRalf … Tasmota Support P1-mqtt in Python, für den oa Zuidwijk Slimme Lezer Diese Lösung setze ich ein.”
A few of his power usage pictures:
- Gas per year
- Warm day in september
- Getting back home on a cold day in winter
- Electricity from/to the network
- The P1 consumer interface can give you this data and by now should be a European standard ([Wayback/Archive] www.netbeheernederland.nl/_upload/Files/Slimme_meter_15_a727fce1f1.pdf
Software and devices that can help you with interfacing to the P1 meter:
- [Wayback/Archive] Lalufu/p1-mqtt: A gateway from smart meters using the P1 protocol to MQTT
- [Wayback/Archive] SlimmeLezer+ – Marcel Zuidwijk
- [Wayback/Archive] P1 Smart Meter – Tasmota
For watermeters there is a similar solution though the firmware is closed source and downloaded from the interwebz. It is at [Wayback/Archive] Slimme Watermeter Gateway – SmartGateways.nl:
There are other water meter solutions too which are purely optical and usually mean fiddling with an optical lens to get focus distance small enough for capturing all watermeter digits via [Wayback/Archive] Marc Haber on Twitter: “@aeble @i_x_s @isotopp …”:
- [Wayback/Archive] Wasserzähler – Selfmade pointed me to [Wayback/Archive] jomjol/water-meter-measurement-system which is now deprecated and got replaced by:
- [Wayback/Archive] Home · jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device Wiki
Key features
- Tensorflow Lite (TFlite) integration – including easy to use wrapper
- Inline Image processing (feature detection, alignment, ROI extraction)
- Small and cheap device (3×4.5×2 cm³, < 10 EUR)
- camera and illumination integrated
- Web surface to administrate and control
- OTA-Interface to update directly through the web interface
- API for easy integration
Idea
Hardware
Web interface
- [Wayback/Archive] water meter / Wasserzähler – AI-on-the-edge by jomjol – Thingiverse
This is a system to take pictures of a water meter for house monitoring the water consumption. It is a part of a house automation system in order to monitor and check the water consumption.The system consists of 3 major parts:- Round clamping adapter to my watermeter = screwless fixation system on water meter, that can be adjusted to the individual geometries
- Tube towards camera – here done with two parts to allow heights adjustment
- Camera holder for ESP32-CAM with OV2640. The ESP32-CAM modules has an inbuild flash LED, so no additional illumination is needed.
It requires modification of the lens to decrease focus distance and this piece:
Given that Kristian lives in a well isolated house, one more option to discuss is heat pump to decrease gas usage for heating: [Wayback/Archive] Andreas on Twitter: “@isotopp Das liegt daran, dass du keine Wärmepumpe hast. Finanziell lohnt sich aber auch schon allein Solar PV, weil es die Stromkosten minimiert, die ja auch stark abhängig vom Gaspreis sind. Nächste Anschaffung ist dann die Luft-Luft-Wärmepumpe und die Gasrechnung ist auch geringer.”
Otherwise it would be best to start at insulating the house even before adding solar panels.
--jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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