Howdy Folks,
After six or so months of researching EmonCMS, Wattnode, and Iotawatt solutions to monitor our home electrical consumption and our home solar electric generation I finally opted for the Iotawatt. I bought this mere weeks before Bob made it available for shipment directly from the U.S. so I bought it from the OEM folks in the U.K… Along with the Iotawatt box I sourced the power and voltage ref plugs as well as a small diameter CT for use with my solar backfeed (10 gauge THHN). Since I’m in the U.S. I needed CTs to put on my mains that allowed for a heavier gauge than anything available from OEM. To source these I researched further and opted for the SCT-019 since it was tested and proven with the Iotawatt and I could find two of them for a reasonable cost.
I’d be happy to share photos of the CTs as I installed them in my main service (solar backfeed) and mains power feed (sub panel inside home) but at this time don’t have them handy. Please feel free to comment if you’d like to see that and I’ll update. I don’t feel what I did in this instance is of particular interest so didn’t photograph. What I do feel is of value to others looking to round out their consumption/generation monitoring is how that info is displayed.
Being a smartphone user of around ten years I have a few old devices that don’t serve me any purpose anymore. I deleted all accounts from an old device and set the phone into “developer mode” so I could ladjust the screen to never go to sleep. I put a single bookmark on the home screen that goes to my EmonCMS graph that is running at all times. I turn the screen off during the day and at night but when I’m at home it lives on a shelf I built to house it alongside the Iotawatt and accessories.
Getting the Iotawatt to output to EmonCMS exactly as I wanted required many trials and errors. Between my testing and assistance from the ever-patient @overeasy I was able to get the graphs to show the data I needed. More on that process can be seen in another thread I started here: Setting up solar in Emoncms