Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:
> http://www.baytech.net/
I had moderate success with this suggestion. Their technical support said
the only product they had that does this is the 4 outlet RPC5 or RPC6
(ethernet version vs serial version). Unfortunately, it costs $644 each
(lowest price I've found so far) and accomplishes it's individual
monitoring by replicating power in and power out plus an ethernet port 4
times. Still, if it's the only one out there I guess they win (although
at $150 per outlet, ouch, that goes over my $4000 budget for this).
http://www.baytech.net/products/prodlist.php?show=RPC5
Jeeze...
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.
Trouble is, switcher loads are not nice & linear & low PF....
Still; I think I'll ask in sci.electronics design...
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.
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