Optimizing your energy, electricity, bill. NodeRed !

In this post I will give some thoughts, high level, and methods for matching the hourly prices from your energy supplier.

I will also list some gadgets and by using NodeRed, get the data, visualize it and control the consumption.

So in that perspective there are some needed prerequisites.....

• Hourly rate agreement with your energy supplier.
• Retrieve hourly prices for the next day. Area covered.
• A mechanism for controlling the use of energy.
• Measure actual consumption.

Prices

To get the prices, for the next day, I'm using the "node-red-contrib-nordpool-api-plus" and to visualize the info "node-red-dashboard". Please check picture above.

Energy consumption

In our case we can get the overall current drawn at the 3 phases via the CTC heating pump Modbus interface and then calculate the used kW.

In the picture to the right the upper chart is plotting the energy consumption, in kW, every 5 seconds with 24 hours history. The lower chart is showing the accumulated energy, in kW, for every hour so you can match with the prices from Nordpool.        

This is one way to measure the energy consumption but there are

         several other gadgets that can report the same info, for example the nice Shelly 3EM and then using their API to get the data.

Energy controlling

Since you got the prices via Nordpool, or other source, you now have to control your appliances so they just goes on at the right time.

Switches

In many cases you can control them with remote switches. We use the Shelly 1 or Shelly PLUS 1 there is also an output from the Shelly 3EM.

                

API

Many appliances are reachable via an API. In our case we use the mentioned Modbus protocol to control our heat pump.

Temperature

If you are living in the northern part of Europe the heating of your place is about 80 % of your energy bill. So measure temperature and use it to control your environment.

There are many gadgets for temperature we use the mentioned Shelly 1 and the battery powered Ruuvi tag. Or some cheep 433 MHz ones where you receive their data with a RTL-SDR.

Code example

The above flow will display the info according to the pictures above. The measured current is simulated with a random node. Every days accumulated energy will be stored in a CSV file.

Example code, NodeRed.