New(bie) Install - My numbers don't add up

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1

Hello! I’m new to IotaWatt with very little electrical background. What a great product! I hesitate to post this because I’m guessing this will be something easy or dumb, but I just setup my new IotaWatt NA kit and am trying to make sure I set it up correctly.

The mains graph (mains1+mains2) does look similar to what the electric provider graphs, so I think that’s accurate, but sometimes the Water Heater is showing higher than mains. That’s not right.

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I have a 50A CT with both of my Water Heater wires going through it, in opposite directions. Or so I think. What might be the cause of this reading too high? Thanks in advance. I’ll have more questions, I’m sure.

2

Can I see the inputs setup display?
Is the Water Heater 3,800 Watts? (Should be on the nameplate)
Couple of things that do not look right:
Mains_2 does not seem to rise when the water heater comes on.
The water heater is a pretty long burn at about 1.5 Hours. Was it cold to start? That would explain the 100 Watt jump after an hour if it switched from the upper demand element to the lower element.

3

Thanks for the quick response! I need to review how I did the water heater again, to see whether that was the one I passed 2 wires through or not. Because I see I also doubled it in Inputs, which wouldn’t make any sense. I’ll have access to that again tonight. I’ll also check wattage on the water heater, I thought it was 5,200 on the sticker. It’s a small tank for a lot of people currently which might explain the long burn time?
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I have the big CT’s both pointing in the same direction. I don’t understand how individual loads would present themselves on Mains_1 and Mains_2, do they generally present on both?

4

It looks like a 3,800 on the plot. The CT is probably on one wire.

That’s OK as long as you don’t have solar. Your status display probably has a “reverse” indicator next to one of them.

Everything goes through the Mains. That’s your issue, that the water heater is not showing up in the mains.

Could you post your status display next time please?

5

So doubling the water heater CT is OK since it’s on 1 wire of the 2?

Is it appropriate that I’m adding Mains_1 and Mains_2 to get the total?
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6

I’m also trying to determine if replacing this 50 gal water heater with a new 100 gal would save me much in energy costs. Does this recovery load look normal?

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7

There’s something wrong here. I think your Mains may not be seated correctly. Do you have a picture of the box with everything installed?

The water heater doesn’t look normal for a typical two element tank. Is it a heat-pump water heater?

At the earliest opportunity, can you read your meter and note the date and time?

8

Sorry, let’s start over on the water heater. I had a woopsie (wrong wires).
The water heater itself says in the 240V column that each element (and the total connected watts) are 5500W.
I now have a CT on each of the two water heater wires and they are reading pretty much in tandem, which I think is what I should expect. So I add them up and get near to 5500 (the tank was just drained with kid baths so this is a good test).

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I also flipped the polarity of Mains_1 CT and assume adding Mains_1 + Mains_2 to get Mains_Total is ok unless I hear otherwise.

Do my Mains numbers look better now?

9

It all looks plausible, but it’s a limited picture. The water heater is running flat-out and the other loads add up to about 2.8kW with a 1kW load cycling for about 8 min every 20 min I think.

You have a unmonitored output that was -748 Watts before. Is that positive now?

10

Yes, the negative was another piece I needed to remedy and the above error(s) were causing that.

Now that I’ve made some changes, is it possible to easily wipe out the history for an Input and start fresh with no data?

11

I’ve done this by deleting the CT and re-setting it up, not sure if its the official way, but it’s how I do it