ISY-99i/ISY-26 INSTEON:Setting up Energy Monitoring with the ISY
What is Energy Monitoring
Saving energy is one part of the home automation equation and there is many benefits from adding it to a home. When you add energy monitors to your home you can monitor your consumption and have the automation adjust to save money. Some ideas are; if you have solar panels, you could use the information to figure out at what settings you want to have your thermostats, lights, etc. If it's peak time when electricity is more expensive you can also adjust the automation to save then too. The relationship of energy monitoring to the devices in the home is the same as weather information is to your home irrigation.
Adding Energy Monitoring to your ISY
In order to add energy monitoring to your house and incorporate it with the ISY you have to obtain some equipment. The equipment you will need is; the controller(s) that collect data from your circuit panel sensors, the small sensing devices called Current Transformers or "CT"s for short which go around each wire in your circuit panel, and finally the special wired/wireless network module(s) that brings all the data in to your network and out to the internet. The controller(s) are installed in a separate electricians box next to your circuit panel which has to be close enough that the wires from the CTs can run to the wires coming out of your breakers. The CTs come in many different sizes in order to fit the large main lines coming in to the circuit panel and smaller sizes to fit the individual breaker wires. List of suppliers that provide the needed energy monitoring equipment.
- Brultech Research Inc. - They sell complete plug-n-play packages for many different circuit panel configurations
- Others supported products coming in the future
Setting up Brultech Energy Monitors
WIP
Accessing the Consumption Data
Now that you have your setup running you can use the data in a couple different ways with the ISY. First you want to decide if you want to access the data with charts/graphs and utilize the data with the ISY, or just utilize the data directly in the ISY without any visual representation. A list of sites that support the ISY and energy monitoring products the ISY supports.
- Check-It Monitoring Solutions - graphical energy monitoring and home automation accessed all in one place
- Others supported products coming in the future
If you plan to connect the energy monitoring products directly to the ISY without the use of charts/graphs please email Bob at UDI for help with this.
(NOTE: This page is obsolete and should not be referenced.)