We recently got a heater for our pool, and I was looking for a way to monitor usage and get an idea of what it was going to cost to use this thing. I stumbled upon IoTaWatt and couldn’t be happier. Installation was a snap, and I’m loving the visibility on our power usage.
After installing, I immediately noticed that my well pump had been running, and didn’t seem to be shutting off. We have a constant pressure system with a subdrive that controls the pump - I opened up the closet and sure enough the green “pumping” light was indeed on. No leaks in the house, turns out the pressure relief valve blew in the well, and was just constantly pumping back into the well, running at about 1kW, to the tune of $3-$4 a day added to the electric bill. Going online with the utility company to look at daily usage, it looks like it started about a month ago.
Issue has been fixed and all is back to normal, but if I hadn’t gotten this device, I would have written the increased bill off as extra AC usage and the (limited) pool heater usage. And it would have gone on for another month or more before I realized what was going on with the pump.
I’ve got data going into influxdb, hooked to grafana, and how have dasboards with current daily usage, billing month date numbers, and a page for the pool details.
not to sound like a commercial, but thanks IoTaWatt!
