Appropriate door sensor for electricty disc meter

[danoussh]

Hello Fellow Member of Domoticz,

I'm looking to install Domoticz on RaspberryPI to monitor Gas/Water/Electricity consumption with wireless capabilites (433Mhz).

At the moment, I know I need a reed/magnetic sensor for the gas meter, and infrared emitter/sensor for my electricity rotary disc meter.
I intend to use an RFXtrx433E USB HA controller (Transceiver and Receiver) to receive 433Mhz signals from the sensors.

But after a bit of searching, It has come to my attention that HomeEasy,Chacon,KlikAanKlikUit,NEXA... door sensors that use "AC" signal burst, are best not to implement in an home automation system. This is because they send a repetitive signal once sensor is triggered, which causes the RFXtrx to stop transmitting for 5 seconds. Whereas KAKU, HomeEasy, Chacon, NEXA... sensors with address code wheels (A-P/1-16) are ARC types and don't behave the same, so they don't block the Rfxtrx.

More info: http://www.domoticaforum.eu/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=7337
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4995&p=37991&hilit ... sor#p37991

So if I'm not mistaken, this is a problem only if you actually use these door sensor as door sensors and would like to send a signal to a light or what ever as soon as the door opens, right?

But all I want to do is to use kaku/chacon... door sensors to monitor my gaz/electricty meters using the reed switch. At this stage I will have nothing else than two 433mhz door sensors only. Maybe three if I work out the how to for the water meter.
Does this configuration seems doable? Or will there be obvious issues?

Thanks in advance,
Best regards,

PS: The post describing the issue was posted in 2012. Maybe has it been fixed?

[danoussh]

UP!

I've also seen some post of people doing to the same thing but with an arduino in between. It's collects a quantity of pulse before sending them to Domoticz. Is that a better way to measure gas pulses than triggering a door sensor every pulse?

Anyone have some thoughts about this?

I suppose you would have to write a script for Domoticz to be able to parse the number of pulse it receives into a virtual gas counter. How reliable is that data? Can I hope to have an identical value as the one on the actual gas counter?

[markk]

Have you looked into Mysensors? https://www.mysensors.org/

[jannl]

Did you check out Youless (www.youless.nl)

[danoussh]

Thanks Markk and Jannl for your responses.

Did you check out Youless (http://www.youless.nl)

The electricity meter YouLess LS110 seems OK product but it doesn't have radio (433Mhz or Wifi-2.4Ghz) nor does it have a battery power supply. I don't have access to electricity power source even though I'm measuring it nor can I use a wired network connection. I'd rather build one as I'll be able to disguise it from anyone, with this product, I may have to open it to deport the IR sensor to place it over the meter and hiding the rest behind the meter. But thanks anyway for the info.

Have you looked into Mysensors? https://www.mysensors.org/

Mysensor seems looks good. I've seen they made power and water meter sketchs.
The only problem is that is does not report to domoticz at each pulse unless the sensor/controller is not in sleeping mode. The reason for "Sleeping Mode" is to extend battery life which is a good thing for me as I will rely on battery power supply. But I also want realtime measure.

Markk or anyone else, how much power consumtion would a single MySensors Micro controller with a reed switch as sensor and a radio module be?


Another solution has also come to light, ESP8266 Wifi module. It's seem very similar to MySensors. This module can be found in many online shops, can then be reprogrammed with ESPEasy firmware to allow to to load arduino sketchs or lua code. Then all I need is to connect reed or IR barrier sensor and load proper sketch to send realtime pulses to domoticz via WIFI. There is even possibility to report battery voltage level with a voltage divider circuit to GPIO pin and send it to domoticz too.


Does anyone have some thought about this?

[danoussh]

After some more reading, it sounds like real-time measure is quite greedy in terms of power consumption. This is why many projects have developed stand-by/deep-sleep modes to reduce power consumption. The only problem with that is, the controller reports every 1min or more the cumulative amount of pulses to Domoticz, which is still precise and accurate but not as good as real-time measurement.

It's seems to be possible to run a micro-controller with sensor and radio for about a day or two, at that point the battery should be empty and will need to be recharged.

One solution was maybe induction pickup from one of the power leads that run through the electricity meter, but I doubt I can draw enough current to run the ESP8266. So that's probably a NO.


EDIT: I think I've found a workable solution. I will measure electricity two different ways simultaneously.
First: Precise/Accurate and drift-less measure using ESP8266 with IR sensor, measuring each pulse then going into deep-sleep but only reporting to Domoticz every 1 or 5 or 10mins. This will extend battery life significantly.
Second: Pretty precise but has some drift in values over a period of time (I'm told at least.). Using a clamp meter placed on wires than run in appartement to fuse box. The advantage here, is that the sensor is close to power plug to power the ESP8266 or other controller.