Looking for Wireless, Datalogging Wattmeter

[OffGridInTheCity]

Iotawatt can run on local network only. That's why I purchased it instead of the other products that require internet access.

The IotaWatt runs on my home's network (LAN) and I have my firewall/router configured to block its internal IP address from any potential connection to the wider web (WAN)

There is a catch. While the basic data does not require any internet access, the fancy graphs and charts do use some cloud files to display the information. (I was surprised by this). There is a work around and you can download those files and load them unto the IoTaWatt's file system and it will no longer require network access of any type. The process of doing this was actually pretty easy.

No problem with graphs - I can make my own if needed. I'm more interested in daily and monthly totals in a dashboard web page + the data logging for review if something happens. Looking at the online 'instructions' it does indeed look like I can just install my own InfluxDB.

It's the inverter output (and generator input) in kwhs that I need to automate. Up to now I use a video camera to log the data shown on cheap meters +manually transfer monthly totals to a spreadsheet.

It's long been on my bucket list to get this automated.

Just fired off an order.... we'll see how it goes

Thank you for the info.

 

[MurphyGuy]

It's the inverter output (and generator input) in kwhs that I need to automate. Up to now I use a video camera to log the data shown on cheap meters +manually transfer monthly totals to a spreadsheet.

Yup, that was on my want list too. My Sunny Island off-grid inverters have no energy meter that is useful, and the solar inverter web interface is mostly useless except for the very basic things.

 

[OffGridInTheCity]

Success - thank you @MurphyGuy!

Just got IotaWatt up/running with data -> InfluxDB v2 and extraction via command line *all on my local net* for proof of concept.

You can see in this snap, I have power meters on each 120v leg of my AIMS 12,000w inverter #2 vs IotaWatt (Note: AIMS #1 is under repair).
- right meter = 1455w <-> IotaWatt Input_1 = 1524w
- left meter = 493w <-> IotaWatt Input_2 = 500w


And as @MurphyGuy said - the data can be logged/retrieved all on the local net via InfluxDB.

The InfluxDB was pretty easy to install - here's the IotaWatt config for uploading data....


And a simple query to extract the data from the InfluxDB via command line to a file....


And the q1.txt file looks like this - e.g. will be able to easily parse into my central SQL Server DB and align with other data for dashboard and graphing.


And IotaWatt has some canned graphing - this is watts on each leg of the output from the AIMS inverter...


And the InfluxDB has web interface query/graphing as well. Here's the same watts on each leg of the AIMS...

 

[OffGridInTheCity]

Looking deeper into the IotaWatt docs, the InfluxDB isn't even needed to extract data for upload to my custom database because IotaWatt supports a rudimentary Query API - https://docs.iotawatt.com/en/master/query.html

This means I can use Linux or Windows (Powershell) wget command to extract the data to a local file like this:

And in the Foo.txt file, I have watts for both legs of Inverter #2 in csv format....

First column is date/time (every 5 secs), second column is watts for 120v leg #1, third is watts for 120v leg #2.

This is perfect (and simple) for my needs!