Pulse counting for gas meter

Hi,

I’ve just purchased and IoTaWatt and lots of CTs to connect it up to my electricity, but I also want to monitor my gas meter, if possible.

I’ve got a setup going with a JeeNode that uses an infra-red reflective sensor to watch for a reflective spot on the meter that comes around, it can then do lots of things, like show an LED for diagnosis or send a radio packet. I’m wondering if I can make a simple output on a 3.5mm jack and feed it into the IoTaWatt, and then get the IoTaWatt to record the pulse somehow.

Is that sort of thing possible? Crazy?

I’d like to simply record the number of pulses, and maybe also convert to kWh.

Sorry, IoTaWatt doesn’t do pulse. It’s strictly a power meter.

Oh okay, no worries.

Presumably if I were to count the pules with my JeeNode and get that to output a current/voltage to match the rate of usage, i.e. pretend to be a CT then that might work with some fiddling somehow?

Steven, did you manage to find a solutions to input pulse meters to Iotawatt? I would be very interested in using this to monitor gas & water usage too.

No, I didn’t. As far as I could tell the IotaWatt is sampling the current waveform, and then combining that with the voltage waveform to get the power, so you’d actually have to kind of do the maths backwards and produce a current waveform that when multiplied by voltage has the correct power.
Seemed like a lot of work, and then we got a smart meter anyway!

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Thanks for your reply Steven. Much appreciated!