OEM in big building: RF reach? long-term maintainability? etc.

Submitted by Guest on Tue, 25/02/2014 - 15:59

Hi,

We have to develop a setup to monitor energy-, heating- and water-consumption of a large university-building on a fancy dashboard in real-time, so I came to OEM, and have the following questions:

-Honestly, what do you think about OEM's long-term operation, is it as stable as usual industrial data-loggers, or does it require regular resets / new installations / maintenance? Could this kind of maintenance be done easily by the usual IT-guys, or do you think an "industrial" of-the-shelf solution would be the better choice here? (I personally have not much IT-knowledge, and will be there only for installation of the system, but not afterwards.)

-as there are distances of about 20m and concrete walls between the different meters, I doubt RF is a good idea (same for serial connection). Did I get it right, that I could use one EmonTx-device for every of the 3 meters (probably all connectet via impulse-output), and connect these 3 EmonTX-devices directly over Ethernet to the webserver with EMONCMS, without an additional RaspberryPI? Again, focus is on stable and reliable operation.

-do you have examples for nice dashboards, so I can see what is possible? As a focus of the project is on communication-design, it should be quite freely configurable.

-last but not least, do you think it is a good idea to use OEM if we have only very basic linux-skills and IT-knowledge, and can't write any code ourselfs but just follow instructions? Or do you know any of-the-shelf software-solutions that can do nice dashboards?

Thanks!