Monitoring Energy Consumption

Hi All,

Does anyone know if there is a way to extract per channel power usage figures from the relay or dimmer units?

I'm building a new place and had planned to dedicate a separate 10A relay channel for all the GPO's in a given room, then somehow extract the usage figures to feed into a graph. After some research, it doesn't appear that this is possible. It would be ideal if the relay units broadcast status messages onto the cbus network regarding the power consumption which could be logged and stored for analysis on a c-gate machine or similar.

I know about the cent-a-meter, however this is not a c-bus enabled product and would require oodles of current meters clamped around all my output channels to achieve the desired result. As far as I know, you cannot then extract the data out of the cent-a-meter for offline analysis.

Failing all this, does anyone have any alternative suggestions regarding how I can achieve the desired result?

Thanks,
Dray.

 

At a guess, I'd say you'd need CTs (Current transformers) which would feed a general input unit.
The CTs themselves would be relatively cheap (basic analogue signal), but you'd be up for around $500 trade price for the General input unit with 4 channels.
One CT per channel, whcih doesn't give you a whole lot of scope for $$ spent.