I’m wondering if there is a way to catch power dropping off and coming back on almost daily. I live in a rural area and my neighbor and I have the power dropping off just long enough to reboot everything and reset digital clocks. We want to log the occurrences to prove to the power company there is a issue.
I do have a iotawatt but I think the sampling is longer than the power bumps last. I would just need to monitor the 2 legs of the 240 single phase into my panel.
Can iotawatt be configured to just sample the 2 legs only very quickly like say 500 ms and capture and log the short events?
Thanks in advace
Iotawatt is not a power quality monitor. It is open source, so theoretically you could create new firmware that did what you want.
I find that many glitches are visible on the voltage plot, so yours must be particularly short in duration.
You cannot configure it with the production firmware, but if sampling only the 3 inputs (voltage and two CTs), the unit will read voltage about every 30 ms.
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You can look at 5 second samples and the weighted average of voltage should show any significant drop.
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You can use an external program to REST the status API to get 1 second samples.
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You can make changes to the firmware to add a 1 second datalog.
Just remember that if the power goes out, the IoTaWatt will lose power as well and will not log anything. Adding a UPS to the IoTaWatt’s 5VDC power supply would in theory keep the internal ESP8266 up and running, but the 9VAC reference voltage transformer must be plugged in directly to the panel’s power in order to achieve accurate voltage readings. A UPS might very well screw up the 9VAC reference transformer’s purpose. And…without the 9VAC reference voltage transformer, the IoTaWatt cannot really measure power usage.
Thus, as other have stated, the IoTaWatt may not be the best device to monitor power outages in terms of frequency and duration.