Working with additional data

Support
1

Hi, I’ve just installed my system the week between Christmas and New Year, and it seems to be working well.

I’m now looking to do a couple of things, and I can’t seem to find anything in the docs, and a search doesn’t bring anything up. It may be that it can’t/shouldn’t be done, but if it can, could someone point me in the direction of the docs please, as I can’t find them.

The first thing I’d like to do is to add some historical data. As I mentioned, I’ve basically just had the system installed since the start of the year, so I don’t have much historical data yet. I can download my power usage from my utility company for the last 13 months on an hour by hour basis. Is there any way that I can import this into the system? I know I’m going to have to just divide it in 2 for each of the legs, so it’s not going to be super accurate, but it’s probably good enough to add some historical context.

The other thing I’m looking to do, is to make use of some of the info I’m getting from my home automation setup. I have a CT on one of the circuits, which in the style of this house, does half the basement (where my computers are), the back room, and the dining room. My home automation keeps track of several of the devices on this circuit, and I’m wondering if I can feed in the data from those devices (and keep better track of them there), and then use the derivations to sum the devices I’m monitoring and subtract that from the CT logged values to give me a figure for the unmonitored portion?

Can I do this with Iotawatt? If I can, is it the best way to do it? And if not, what is?

Thanks for any help and pointers.

Graham

2

Hi Graham,

That you want to use IoTaWatt as general analytic engine is a compliment to the way it works, but truth be told, the poor little ESP8266 is running near flat-out to do what it does now.

You want to aggregate time series data from multiple sources. There are other products that do a better job of that. InfluxDB/grafana is one of the most popular with IoTaWatt users, and I have support for the newer influxDB-v2 coming out soon.

IoTaWatt can upload to an instance of influxDB, and there are multiple ways to ingest other data into influx. The newer influx cloud v2 offering has more than 100 Telegraf plugins to ingest data, and the cloud version has a dashboard system for creating visualizations.

3

Thanks for the reply. The IoTaWatt is doing great for what I want it to do with the power monitoring, and it seemed a logical place to group the additional power monitoring - but as Scotty said ‘use the right tools for the right job’

Spinning up InfluxDB, Mosquitto, NodeRed and Grafana VMs are on my list for the next couple of days for my home automation setup. Once I’ve got them up and running, I’ll hit the IoTaWatt docs and check out on how to get the data over there.

Thanks very much.

Graham