Just thought I’d post up a photo of the new install. I still have some cleaning up to do in the panel, so no pics there. I’m still figuring out the best way to access this remotely, and how to tie this into emoncms. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. I wish I had done this a month ago, as we had a new inverter drive AC unit installed and I would have liked to see the comparison of power usage to the old unit.
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I’ve come across an issue now as well. I had poor signal strength so I purchased a wifi extender. Even after placing the wifi extender 12 ish feet away (there’s one concrete wall between it and the extender) I’m still seeing an RSSI of -75 to -80 (almost no improvement). The router it was connected to was a great deal further away so I would have expected to see some improvement.
Edit I just realized the issue might be that all the power for the house runs up that wall right above the panel. I’d assume that could cause significant interference. If that’s the case that kind of sucks, as remounting it will definitely be a huge pain. Plus I’d have to cap those holes up top. I chose the top originally because the only open space in the panel is on the top/right. The conduit would have been harder to run on the side since there’s already liquidtite and EMT running up the right side of the panel.
It’s probably still using the router AP. If you can see what channel your router is using, you can compare that to the channel in the WiFi tab of the IoTaWatt status display.
When I was using an extender, I gave it a different SSID so that I could configure the IoTaWatt to that particular AP.
Note the channel IoTaWatt is using and restart it. See if it comes back up on a different channel.
It’s definitely a different SSID, as it added an EXT to the SSID when I created the new network. It’s on channel 2, I restarted, still on channel two.
See my edit above, I think that could be the issue.
I doubt the power feed is your problem.
Sorry if this seems obvious, but did you reconfigure the IoTaWatt WiFi for the new access point and does that show up in the status display under the WiFi tab?
Yep. It’s working just fine at the moment. I’m just worried about it disconnecting when the RSSI is bouncing from -75 up down to -83 ish. I was experiencing intermittent cutouts yesterday when I was getting everything all setup. I would just like to see a signal closer to -60 tbh.
I have another brand of wifi extender on order. So I’ll give that a shot. I moved the one I have to the other side of that wall. It’s only 3 feet away in a straight line. Signal to range extender from router AP is good according to TP links setup app.
One of my test systems is -73 or so all the time. Never disconnects. I have other systems in the -60s and they disconnect from time to time. The RSSI is one metric. Interference from other 2.4GHz devices, and there are plenty, as well as other routers in the area, can cause problems even with a robust RSSI.
Disconnects/Connects are recorded in the message log. You can get a sense of how often they occur by simply looking at the log. It’s entirely possible that you won’t have any significant problem.
Understood, I’ll keep an eye on the log and report back if I have issues.
Thank you!