Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

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johnstonf
Posts: 131
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2016 10:03 am

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by johnstonf » Mon Dec 19, 2016 12:41 pm

-Yes, i have moved the CH1/CH2 CT's to bottoms... no change
-All my channels are loaded with CT's... it was just removed to temporarily test.
/fj



ben wrote:
johnstonf wrote:I did a bunch of testing on a specific channel, and even with NO CT attached, I'm getting noise. With the CT (Micro-80) connected, I tried moving the cables around, away from all power lines, with/without jumper, etc, still noise! On ANOTHER channel, the jumper stopped the noise... it's hard to figure out!

A 'LOT' of my channels have noise, but not all!

/fj
A channel with no CT may pick up noise. Unused channels you can set the CT Range higher in order to zero those values out (CT Range doubles/halves the value).

Did you try moving the CH1/CH2 CTs to the bottom two ports of the channel?
scottmichaelj
Posts: 26
Joined: Wed Feb 17, 2016 3:12 pm

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by scottmichaelj » Mon Dec 19, 2016 5:42 pm

FWIW I also had issues with this myself. In the end I just had to ignore things. I worked with Ben for weeks via email and was never able to get zero watts on channels without effecting another channel. For my sanity I gave up and moved on. It was not enough to be an issue. I know it doesnt help you but I am OCD and just had to give up as it became a time suck.
johnstonf
Posts: 131
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2016 10:03 am

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by johnstonf » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:06 pm

I HEAR YA!... I think a lot of people who would buy and install this would be OCD... I'm for sure in that club. I'll see what Ben and the crew comes back with... I sure wish i had known about the Guage not working properly... i spent many hours fartin around with it, thinking it way my fault (as many things are for a newby lol)... I have to laugh though... I thought my wife would be impressed... she was and she wasn't....

WASN'T impressed:
-In the 2nd graph on the main page...
Can't figure out why she has to translate Blue to Green, Green to Red, and Yellow is Yellow
"I'm not going to try to figure that out!... fix it!"
...me... "I can't, it's not end-user configurable"
her... (forget it)
...me... lol)
-But YET, in the TOP graph, Red is Red, Yellow is Yellow, Green is Green
-With the number of hours I've spent working on "little system glitches"

WAS impressed:
...her to me... after showing her some cost calculations!...
-"Oh Hunny, it's only 40 cents to do a load of laundry during RED?"... "I'm going to start doing a lot more loads during RED then!... instead of when I'm tired at night, and the cost is 20 cents.
-CRAP LOL

Oh well, win some, loose some...

At least i know what breakers and circuits go where now... no more flipping breakers for 5 minutes.

I hope i can fix all these "wee glitches" at some point! (oops, there's my OCD again... STOP!)

/fj
scottmichaelj wrote:FWIW I also had issues with this myself. In the end I just had to ignore things. I worked with Ben for weeks via email and was never able to get zero watts on channels without effecting another channel. For my sanity I gave up and moved on. It was not enough to be an issue. I know it doesnt help you but I am OCD and just had to give up as it became a time suck.
scottmichaelj
Posts: 26
Joined: Wed Feb 17, 2016 3:12 pm

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by scottmichaelj » Mon Dec 19, 2016 7:13 pm

johnstonf wrote:I HEAR YA!... I think a lot of people who would buy and install this would be OCD... I'm for sure in that club. I'll see what Ben and the crew comes back with... I sure wish i had known about the Guage not working properly... i spent many hours fartin around with it, thinking it way my fault (as many things are for a newby lol)... I have to laugh though... I thought my wife would be impressed... she was and she wasn't....

WASN'T impressed:
-In the 2nd graph on the main page...
Can't figure out why she has to translate Blue to Green, Green to Red, and Yellow is Yellow
"I'm not going to try to figure that out!... fix it!"
...me... "I can't, it's not end-user configurable"
her... (forget it)
...me... lol)
-But YET, in the TOP graph, Red is Red, Yellow is Yellow, Green is Green
-With the number of hours I've spent working on "little system glitches"

WAS impressed:
...her to me... after showing her some cost calculations!...
-"Oh Hunny, it's only 40 cents to do a load of laundry during RED?"... "I'm going to start doing a lot more loads during RED then!... instead of when I'm tired at night, and the cost is 20 cents.
-CRAP LOL

Oh well, win some, loose some...

At least i know what breakers and circuits go where now... no more flipping breakers for 5 minutes.

I hope i can fix all these "wee glitches" at some point! (oops, there's my OCD again... STOP!)

/fj
scottmichaelj wrote:FWIW I also had issues with this myself. In the end I just had to ignore things. I worked with Ben for weeks via email and was never able to get zero watts on channels without effecting another channel. For my sanity I gave up and moved on. It was not enough to be an issue. I know it doesnt help you but I am OCD and just had to give up as it became a time suck.
I live in a area where we only have ONE rate. Imagine that! So I am not familiar with the RED, GREEN, YELLOW or whatnot, but yes should be user configurable and make sense. I also can understand the wife thing too, "Oh so I can save a whole $0.20 to inconvenience myself? No thanks!" - basically same thing I would have gotten. Maybe in CA when you hit Tier 3 in the summer but still doubtful. Where I am now GAS is more than Electric yet we have to turn on the gas fireplace each night because "it looks nice" while cuddled in a blanket on the couch watching TV during the winter. :?: Its a direct venting fireplace to the outside! Talk about wasting money. I did finally add a internal blower/fan to get some benefits. My live gauges are working, yours aren't? The biggest pro for me was to see what my actual use was for each circuit. For me I thought my fridge and wine cellar would be power hungry, but was WRONG. My radiant heated floors in my master bathroom which I thought would be "like running a 100W light" WRONG AGAIN! When its "warming" I am using about 1200W! My towel warmers are using 150W each and run all day. So with a few "tricks" using my UDI ISY I now can turn off the towel warmers from midnight till 6am without interrupting the forces to be and still save $$. It was nice to figure out what each outlet/light now goes to circuit wise and what the house is using at any given second. Overall it is an expensive system but I would do it again without a doubt. In the end theres no ROI but the knowledge I gained and feedback I can see from my home was money well spent. Now to get a few features added and tweaked to the Dashbox would be great. I would love to see a ical link so I can log/see the daily use to my google calendar, automatic daily backups of the data, and notifications to Pushover.
johnstonf
Posts: 131
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2016 10:03 am

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by johnstonf » Mon Dec 19, 2016 9:36 pm

My pig of a hot water heater is on for 3+ htrs/day at 3500 watts, and putting it onto a contactor controlled by Insteon via UD ISY and only heating in green zone has paid and will pay a good chunk of my Insteon / ISY ROI. This GEM is fun to look at and impress my friends with, but wont have great ROI, me is thunkin.

Sent from my GT-N7105 using Tapatalk
ben
Site Admin
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Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by ben » Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:31 am

Working on getting those colors showing correctly.

I talked to Paul to see if there's anything else that can be done to at least hide the noise. We discussed having an option to filter out Watt values less than or equal to 1W. We might be able to have to user configurable value that filters out all values less than X Watts.
Ben
Brultech Research Inc.
E: ben(at)brultech.com
ben
Site Admin
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Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by ben » Tue Dec 20, 2016 4:34 pm

Attached a version of the COM firmware that filters out Watt values 2W or less if you want to try it out.

You can load it via the GEM Network Utility available at http://www.brultech.com/software under the GreenEye Monitor section.
Attachments
GEM_C Firmware 4.29_spec.fmw
(283.59 KiB) Downloaded 102 times
Ben
Brultech Research Inc.
E: ben(at)brultech.com
Teken
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Location: The Bad Lands

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by Teken » Tue Dec 20, 2016 4:48 pm

What's going to happen if you actually have 1-2 watts of real energy consumption? :?: Will the system not display that energy reading at all? :?
Teken . . .

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scottmichaelj
Posts: 26
Joined: Wed Feb 17, 2016 3:12 pm

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by scottmichaelj » Tue Dec 20, 2016 5:34 pm

Teken wrote:What's going to happen if you actually have 1-2 watts of real energy consumption? :?: Will the system not display that energy reading at all? :?
This is a good question. However for the channels that have nothing connected to them and hid this would be perfect. So that maybe the best option. Don't worry about the small energy shown on connected channels but for channels with nothing it will stop adding phantom energy consumption for those.
johnstonf
Posts: 131
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2016 10:03 am

Re: Can i micro-calibrate CT's showing incorrect watts?

Post by johnstonf » Tue Dec 20, 2016 7:45 pm

You can do it on a per-channel x-watts... can you also do anything based on the profile that it is very spiky looking (like noise would)... maybe spikes of 1-2 watts AVERAGE to .5 for exampe?, where a REAL low watt would be more FLAT (so average being close to max of 80% of readings for example).
scottmichaelj wrote:
Teken wrote:What's going to happen if you actually have 1-2 watts of real energy consumption? :?: Will the system not display that energy reading at all? :?
This is a good question. However for the channels that have nothing connected to them and hid this would be perfect. So that maybe the best option. Don't worry about the small energy shown on connected channels but for channels with nothing it will stop adding phantom energy consumption for those.
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