Hi. Ive been looking into this for a while and wondering if anyone has any advice.
I live in a shared house with 4 bedrooms, our electricity supply and bill is shared, we have very little electrical in common areas and heating is supplied by panel heaters connected to the mains in each room . Im personally not a very heat requiring person but two of my housemates seem to perpetually have uncomfortably warm rooms, they are also in the house most of the day as they work from home. I have no issue paying bills, but as somebody in the house less than 10 hours a day I am burdoned by paying a share of electricity I dont use.
I was looking into the emontx v3 and using the 4 CT clamps to monitor usage for the sockets in each of the bedrooms to divide up the bills in a fair manor.
Could this be done fairly easily (the house has a breaker for each rooms socket circuit , and the cables are easily accessible.
also can I use two emontx's with one base ? If I could do the common area and overall incomming supply to make the system auto calculate usage that would be great.
Re: Beginner Questions : Using Emon for bill sharing
Using two EmonTx's with a single base (via RF) is definitely supported. And if the circuits for each room are wired back to your distribution board to distinct breakers then clipping a CT sensor around each one should give you pretty accurate results for those rooms.
One thing to note is the 4th CT sensor on the EmonTx v3 is slightly different than the other 3 - check out the WIKI for more details.
Re: Beginner Questions : Using Emon for bill sharing
"One thing to note is the 4th CT sensor on the EmonTx v3 is slightly different than the other 3 - check out the WIKI for more details." But it can be made very nearly the same with the addition of one resistor.
You need the whole house to be on one phase for that to work with the default sketch, else you need to load the 3-phase approximation sketch.