Electrical Panel With Network Monitoring of Individual Circuits?

Aug 04, 2011 1 Replies

I have been looking for a long time for an electrical panel with an ethernet jack (or wireless network) that would allow remote monitoring of power utilization *of individual circuits* in the panel. This is to be able to find out - for example - which rooms in a home or building use the most energy during a given month, and to have ongoing monitoring for heavy use items like HVAC.



I have found several solutions that let you monitor the entire panel's power use, but those don't allow you to break out individual circuits on the panel. I know you can put up separate monitors for each circuit of interest, but using discrete devices to monitor each circuit costs a lot and takes up a lot of wall space as well.



Does anyone make a panel where all this functionality is integrated into the one panel? It seems like such an obvious product, and computerization and miniaturization have reached the point where such a panel should be easy to implement.


Hello, and things are somewhat more complicated if other than close-to-unity power factors are involved (in which case we could do the sniffing just with current transformers). What you then need are watthour meters on each circuit of interest. I don't have a schematic for one of those low cost electrical energy usage monitors (e.g. Kill-A-Watt, Watts Up, etc) but the electronics could probably be interfaced to an ethernet port (wired network) or an 802.11 or ZigBee for wireless. (This sounds like a great project for Nuts and Volts magazine!) Sincerely,

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