Oh boy, you had to mention that?Teken wrote: As an aside looking forward to new and more updates in your projects thread!
I have actually made excellent progress, with the hardware portion! By great fortune, Sears has once again made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I've gotten another Gladiator component for the wall storage in the garage. And the connection to the GEM is that the wall piece will be used to cover up the wires running from the panel to the GEM. So at some point hopefully before the end of the month I'll have things completed.
The software has also had some progress, but it has been much slower and more difficult, which there really isn't any reason everybody has to reinvent the wheel with the emoncms, but help there is very limited. As an aside, for setting up the program, there is a step which has changed since the instructions were put on the Github, I and several others have needed to ask for help because of that, I pointed out that it would be great to update the instructions, and the instructions remain unchanged. But yes, I've just about got things finished up with the software too.
Finding out I can measure and record amperage with the GEM has been a great help. And of course, it did lead to the bit of initial confusion, but thanks to all who've helped, I and hopefully any future users do understand how it works.
It would be great to have the Power Factor available too, as wci68 is suggesting, because it will give people more insight into if motors are working efficiently. I just happened to quickly find this article: http://ecmweb.com/motors/motor-efficien ... r-and-load
In the GWN where Teken is, pools are probably rare, but down here they are everywhere, with the corresponding pool motor most likely working inefficiently. I have gotten to the point with the GEM that I can see when the filter is needing to be cleaned because you can see a greater electric usage from the pool motor.
And it really would be great to have the additional channels, but I don't know how much that would add to the cost of the GEM. It was pretty tough to justify the what I consider significant amount spent, although yes, it was definitely worth it,