On Tue, 9 Aug 2005, David Lesher wrote:
If you can live w/o true watts, I'd bet someone has a Hall effect sensor package that could tell you just amps. Such would be non-contact and would thus skirt the US issue, I'd bet.
I'd love to hear about an actual purchaseable lower cost per circuit version of this as well. For a separate project I looked around for this, it's generally called branch circuit monitoring, and the most widely used standard is called Modbus (which uses RS 485 serial) that also has a version called Modbus TCP (which uses ethernet). The Modbus TCP stuff looks pretty nice with it's data in XML format (easy to parse), and there are boxes that will convert regular Modbus to Modbus TCP. The two main sources of this are Veris and Square D. Veris: http://www.veris.com/product.asp?idMainCategory=45&idCategory=106&idProduct=98 Square D: http://ecatalog.squared.com/catalog/173/html/sections/04/17304008.html At $2588 per 42 position breaker panel it works out to $61 a circuit. I'd like to find this for cheaper as well so that we can just put it everywhere on every panel and not worry about it. Here is an example of the Modbus TCP stuff: http://www.wpsenergy.com/JayNick/MBTCP/default.html Mike. +----------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -----------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 510 580 4100 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting Colocation Fax 510 580 4151 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+