Mill Creek NetZero Home's electricity, as measured by the TED 5000 and published by Google Powermeter

The Solar Energy Society of Alberta (SESA) has been a stalwart member of Edmonton’s green community for many years. They have a great web resource here, and their seminar series has been a vital resource for showcasing the cutting edge of solar and efficiency technologies deployed in Alberta over the past decade.

I’m grateful that SESA saw fit to purchase a TED 5000 electricity monitor for installation in the Mill Creek Net Zero Home.  The TED 5000 allows us to measure four flows of electricity (the main panel, the hot water tank, and both solar inverters). I hope that it will provide important data to Edmonton’s green community, and it will certainly be perfect for measuring our energy use during our net zero energy year. The data is published to the web automatically via Google Powermeter. I plan to write an app that will publish the data publically, but that is a ways off yet.

Thank you Solar Energy Society of Alberta!

Installation pictures and details are below the fold.

My multi-talented friend Philip installed the TED 5000 for me:

Each electricity flow is measured by a set of CTs (I call them donuts). We have four sets. You can see the main feed being measured at the top.

The instructions say to attach each MTU (box that talks to a set of donuts) to a separate two-pole breaker. Philip cleverly figured out that their power sources could be combined in a box and then routed to a single two-pole breaker.

The MTUs then communicate via the house’s electric wires to a gateway (above left), which is connected to our network router. The gateway saves the data, and publishes it to a special software that ships with the TED 5000 as well as to Google Powermeter.