I’ve been finding the electricity sub-meters in the House very useful, showing the electrical consumption of the ‘significant’ electrical loads as a proportion of the total recorded by the main electricity meter, so I’ll be adding some in the Outbuildings too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the House, I initially used cheap meters with only an S0 ‘pulse’ output and recorded the readings manually every month. Later, I found some affordable (second-hand) M-Bus adaptors for the ‘pulse’ meters (various models from the Relay Padpuls range<\/a>) and added those, enabling the meters to be included in the once-per-minute reading cycle for the Water meters and the Heat meters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ‘significant’ loads that in my view warrant a dedicated sub-meter are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a wide choice of electricity meters with an S0 ‘pulse’ output (EN 62053-31) and a rather smaller choice of meters with a Modbus<\/a> output. For meters with a native M-Bus (Meter-Bus<\/a>) output the choice is smaller still – but for a building that needs to have some M-Bus metering anyway<\/em> it’s much more straightforward to add further M-Bus meters than to cater for alternative metering protocols as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve settled on using MID-certified M-Bus meters from UK company Rayleigh Instruments<\/a>, having added one of their meters to the House a few months ago and after receiving positive feedback from another self-builder who uses one for their air-to-water Heat Pump:<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are available for about \u00a325 each; surprisingly the larger meter is less than 10% more expensive than the smaller one, so actually I only use the smaller one for loads up to about 16A (where the smaller terminals are helpful for connecting smaller-section cables) and use the larger one for loads like the EV charge points, where the load won’t even exceed 32A.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Rayleigh meters are shipped with their Primary M-Bus address set to ‘0’ (RI-D35-100-MB) or ‘1’ (RI-D175-MB) so if the intention is to extract readings using the Primary rather than the Secondary M-Bus addresses, these need to be changed from the default. This can be accomplished using one of the utilities shipped as part of the libmbus<\/a> codebase:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been finding the electricity sub-meters in the House very useful, showing the electrical consumption of the ‘significant’ electrical loads as a proportion of the total recorded by the main electricity meter, so I’ll be adding some in the Outbuildings … Continue reading \n
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$ mbus-serial-set-address -b 2400 \/dev\/ttyUSB0 old_primary_address<\/em> new_primary_address<\/em><\/code><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"