Who uses PlotWatt? Does it work for you?

General Discussion
1

I have an Aeon Home Energy monitor (v1) and use it to report my whole house power to PlotWatt. PW is supposed to be able use deduce individual appliance usage from this data (i.e, Coffee Maker, Washing Machine, etc.)

For over a year, I had it reporting every minute (which is the min reporting time PW says it needs to work) and it never identified a single appliance - it would just report total usage. About two weeks ago, I upped it to every 15s and started a fresh account. Now it has two “categories” - Always On and Learning.

I was just curious is anyone else is using PlottWatt and if so, is it working for you?

Edit: tagging @talz13 because I saw you use it

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2

I’m just getting started with PlotWatt myself… So far I’ve gotten the realtime reporting working, but the history / trends are blank for me. I’m trying to contact them about that, but waiting on a response.

3

Oh wow, after a couple hours, data started showing up on the charts! Looking good, I can see the peaks and valleys when (I assume) my dehumidifier kicks on / off. It’ll be interesting to see how it looks over time!

Side note, I have it reporting every 15 seconds, but may change that to 5 seconds. I would go for the 1 second resolution, but PlotWatt suggests doing some form of batching if you’re going to be sending that much data, and I don’t want to modify the posting code that much yet!

4

I used Bidgely with TED, and it was good at figuring out what appliances were which, though it couldn’t do electric cars (ironically, because they are super easy to figure out IMO). Very nice interface/app.

However, my TED is down more than it is up (the integration with Bidgely anyways), so now I’m looking into the HEM device. I’m interested in what options like Plotwatt there are out there.

I’ll add PVOutput.org for anyone doing solar, but my TED fails to update it as well (it starts for a day or two then dies). It doesn’t do device finding, but it plots energy use very well for those with Solar. I feel like there is not one cohesive solution for my energy plotting needs yet.

Add to this “Initial State” and “Numerous” as possibilities, but they are more generic graphing engines (both very nice).

Note: I’m an Eversource customer, so no zigbee meter love for me that I know (but I’m researching just in case, because in theory I have a newer ltron net meter for my solar).

5

I’d like very much if the aeon smart energy switches could be worked in there to give more itemized knowledge of individual appliances, instead of relying solely on their detection routines.

6

I created a smpartapp to upload to Bidgely and one for PlottWatt.

2 Likes
7

I know what I’ll be doing this morning!

8

Ok, just get a spinny circle when I try to install the Plotwatt version (Bidgely made me mad today, they won’t let me disassociate my Google account/cancel and recreate an account). Also I see that Plotwatt has settings for Geothermal and Electric cars, yay!

Questions:

  1. What is the “meter id”?
  2. Any ideas?

Also, I can’t click on the “modes” settings either. Will check that too.

I’m going to start digging into the code.

Edit1: Found multiple versions installed, uninstalled them. Modes aren’t a part of the code, they are default ST prefs, learned something.

Edits2-6: Believe I have this working. I have two “gateways” by accident, and not sure if that affected it, but couldn’t delete the first, and ended up just switching to the second. Mixed into this mess, I had to get git, and CURL to create and then get the ID of my meter. My meter ID for others that might struggle with this was eight digits long.

I’m wondering @bigpunk6 if you had a meter already created, or will the call create it? How did you know your meter ID?

9

Sorry forgot to post instructions for creating the meter Id. I’m looking at putting creation and selecting of meter Id in the code.
https://plotwatt.com/docs/api

Bidgely allows connecting multiple meters and my code supports it. I have to look into PlotWatt though.

I’ll look into geothermal and cars also.

10

I have it set to 1 second with my code because it allows bulk uploads.

11

The settings are on the site, don’t go looking for them, they are just for it’s algorithms.

However, if you were able to support multiple “meters”, that would be very interesting… This is working now for me, though I think I have a direction problem with my solar in there, I’ve got to figure that out.

thanks for this!

12

You can’t use my code for anything that produces energy. They use different parameters that are not in my code.

13

But shouldn’t the net result work? I just have the HEM on the mains and the solar feeds the panel. So sometimes the energy use is negative, which is maybe what the issue is… I’ll take a look at the code.

Edit: I think I see the issue. Appears to assume energy use only. Hmm.

Latest is that I think the HEM only reports positive values. I’m digging into that.

14

I haven’t tried PlotWatt, but I actually use Initial State.

www.initialstate.com

Initial State stores most of your ST data, depending on what you care about. ie: when doors are locked/unlocked, lights on off, etc. They just integrated energy metering a few weeks ago. Its pretty gosh darn cool!!

my personal goal is to collect the data of how much I’ll be saving, maximizing my evap cooling system usage in Arizona before having to use AC system.

15

I use IS too, but it only can do so many events before it wants money, and it didn’t do energy very specifically last I looked. I can vouch for it being VERY nice though, and it will do 25K events before shutting you off. I’ll check it out again if there are new energy calcs.

PS: BTW, found out the HEM can report negative values, it’s just a config option in the device.

Already edited my device to have that feature, testing now.

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16

Yeah, I uninstalled the IS app after seeing the errors popping up, wanting me to upgrade my IS account :weary:

17

Is this working for everyone?
I tried it as written and I’m getting groovyx.net.http.HttpResponseException: Forbidden @ line 71

18

works fine for me… the key is the id is not your house id but your meter id…
I got confused by that too. You can have multiple meters in a house… see my post here

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19

Steve,

I also have the Aeon HEM v1, just recently purchased. How were you able to up the reporting to every 15s? Mine’s reporting everything 5 minutes, and I’d like more granularity.

Thanks!

20

@Jeff_Carroll, you have to change the reporting value in the device driver. Open the device type code in the IDE and look for the line:

zwave.configurationV1.configurationSet(parameterNumber: 111, size: 4, scaledConfigurationValue: 15).format()

The scaledConfigurationValue: is the reporting interval (I have it set to 15s as you see above). Change that to whatever you want, then save and publish the device type.

Then finally in app on your phone, open the device and click the “Configure” button - that will send the parameters to the Energy Monitor - it should now start updating at the interval you specified.