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flamegrilledmatt avatar image
flamegrilledmatt asked

Energy monitor for Economy 7 tarriff via VRM?

Hi all,

Does anyone know how to get a daily cost or even live report on electricity used from the grid, when I am on a dual tarriff (Octopus Economy 7) that also takes into account the standing charge etc. ie Want to actually see £ and p. The supplied in home display from Octopus doesn't work with Eco 7 and as I have an ET112 and a Cerbo is there anyway that can be programmed to act as an in-home display?

I'm OK with setting up the Cerbo in standard Victron form, but Node Red, scripts etc are beyond me.

Looking in the reporting section of VRM I can only get a financial comparison report.

Any ideas anyone?

Many thanks,

Matt.

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matt1309 avatar image matt1309 commented ·

Hi @flamegrilledmatt


I'm not aware of a specific report/feature that's ready to go for getting such data. If node red's out the window maybe downloading VRM data in CSV form and using excel formula to extract the economy 7 data?

If for example you have time is in Column A of excel sheet/csv and add an if statement in excel that adds a column to the data to flag if the time is in economy 7 time or normal time.


Say the new column is in colum d, and the date/time is in column A

in cell D2 you'd put

=if(and(A2>5pm, A2<6am),"Economy 7 rate","normal")


Then you can pivot the data or simply filter it for "Economy 7 rate". To see the economy 7 data.

It's more manual than node red route.

Node red isn't as daunting after you've dabbled a little. The logic would be the same/if statement would be the same


Node red:

Get Grid usage -> write to Economy 7.csv.

You can probably setup node red to even write to a google drive or some other shared server so you wouldnt even need to download the files. However you could also write csv directly to cerbo and download via ssh. (Just have to make sure you regularly delete the data so it never gets too big, you cold also use node red to delete data if gets too big)


Similar logic to excel though

if after 5pm but before 6am or whatever time it is write to economy7.csv and if outside of that time write to normal.csv.

If you write to google drive then it'll be there ready to go. If you write directly to cerbo files then you'll need to ssh in to download the files and regularly delete them so they dont get too big for the system.

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flamegrilledmatt avatar image flamegrilledmatt matt1309 commented ·

Hi Matt,

Many thanks for such a detailed answer, much appreciated. I will have to have a look at Node Red I think, but will certainly give the excel idea a go though.

Ideally though, and I can think many people on dual tarriffs or Agile/Go style tarriffs it would be great feature if the cerbo display could actually work like an in-home-display as it appears as if none of these in-home displays actually work with time-of-day style tarriffs. Have tried one from Efergy and whilst okay-ish, was fairly inaccurate and did not account for daily standing charge etc.... Just a thought @Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager)

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matt1309 avatar image matt1309 flamegrilledmatt commented ·
No worries, yeh if you understand the logic for excel then node red isn't a big jump from there and you'd have it fully automated then.


I think Node red also supports dashboards (you may need to add that node not sure if it's installed by default on venus os large) but you could probably make exactly what you're after in node red (with limited/little coding required).


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