I am preparing to replace most if not all of the wiring in our house. It is old, some of it is dangerous, and almost none of it is grounded. For some time I have been interested in home automation, and one of the things that I would like to accomplish with this electrical refit is to install some consumption monitoring.
Now I have seen some products that essentially clamp a current meter to the wire coming out of the circuit breaker and then that plugs into a little box that can be queried by software to get current load on the line. This is all well and good but it looks like that gets really crowded in the load center real fast, and is really geared toward people who do not want to buy new breakers/load center, etc.
I am replacing both, and I am on the lookout for some kind of breaker that can not only trip under higher load conditions, but also report the load at any given time.
I saw these Square D breakers that are part of the Wiser Energy product line, but the literature makes it sound like the monitoring they do is specifically for power outage situations where power source needs to be switched from grid to backup or something.
Has anyone encountered load center and circuit breaker products that meter the current and can report (either by custom software or supplied software)?
Best Answer
Couple problems with that particular product. #1 it's $480. #2 using it means you can't use an AFCI or GFCI breaker there, and you will need a lot of them in a rewire.
The latest whole-house monitoring systems don't put a clamp ammeter on every circuit. They put them on the main feed for that panel, L1 and L2. They distinguish one load from another by the type of noise it places on the line, inrush current, interval it operates on, that kind of thing. They really don't care which circuit the load is on. The installation is fairly neat.