Energy Monitoring with Alarm.com

Support
1

I had a few questions about how the energy monitoring works and I am hoping that you might be able to help.

I have two of the aeon power meters, both are powered by the usb power adapter, and have had the 3.67 firmware update applied. I have a smartthings hub as my primary zwave controller, and both the smartthings hub and ADC are pulling in power readings.

So it all appears to be working, however the readings seem low. If I do a ‘power use now’ reading, the Watts are the same in my smartthings app and ADC. However my question revolves around how the power use accumulates into kwh in ADC. Could the power usage total be getting cut in half by reading it into multiple places? I believe smartthings polls for the wattage every 15 seconds. Does ADC do something similar? Thanks!

2
If I do a ‘power use now’ reading, the Watts are the same in my smartthings app and ADC. However my question revolves around how the power use accumulates into kwh in ADC. Could the power usage total be getting cut in half by reading it into multiple places? I believe smartthings polls for the wattage every 15 seconds. Does ADC do something similar?

The metered power reading would not be halved by updating two controllers.

If the readings match, that would be an accurate representation of what the device is measuring. Are both equally appearing low?

Just to make sure, what is the model and generation of the device? Aeotec makes a few different power metering devices. Are these the whole home meters?

3

Pretty certain I have the generation 1 whole house meters. What I was asking whether the energy meter did some math, like amount of power times the time since it was last polled, and reports KWH, or if ADC gets KW readings and does the time math to get KWH. I was thinking that if the power used was accumulating and being tracked by the meter, and two hubs are asking for those readings at different times, the power used could be getting split. Thanks

4

This is a good question, tracking is done in the meter, afaik, as it has parameters to report kWh, but it should not halve the result in either case. kWh do not depend on whether or when the device is polled, except in how approximate the resulting kWh reading would be if the controller was tracking kWh based on wattage, and the metered watts would be identical whether the device is polled or not, and regardless of how often it is polled.

A kWh is a unit of energy, equal to the amount of energy used by sustaining 1000W over 1 hour.

A device operating at 1000 watts would need to be in operation for 1 hour to use 1 kWh.
A device operating at 10 watts would need to be in operation for 100 hours to use 1 kWh.

If you check power use now, it is telling you the wattage being used at the moment.

To provide an example: It looks like a reading was taken today of the wattage being used at 10:45 AM. At that time, 93 W was being used.

At 93 W it would take over 10 hours of sustained use to reach 1 kWh. Obviously power use now does not mean that 93 was sustained, that will shift throughout normal use, but if you were averaging somewhere around 125-150 W today, the kWh reading looks like what I would expect since about sunrise. It all depends on what is being used and for how long.

In other words, if you take a measurement of watts using “check power use now”, and it reports 150 watts, you leave all downstream power consumption the same for 1 hour, check via the power use now every once in a while and average 150 W, you will have used in that hour period .15 kWh.

Try pulling some current usage data every so often over an hour period and then check the updated kWh, does it match the math?