On this occasion I have proposed to measure the electricity consumption of my entire house to make comparative estimates with the collection of my energy bill and analyze.

On this occasion I will use the IoT platform Ubidots in its Industrial version, previously we had done tests with the educational version, but this industrial version has special features for data analysis and more visual dynamism allowing to create very dynamic dashboards.

Previous tests with Ubidots Educational: Meter PZEM-004 + ESP8266 & Platform IoT Ubidots

I will use a PeaceFair PZEM-004T meter and an ESP32 (ESP-WROOM-32) FireBeetle Modules from the DFRobot online store.

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Warning

Before starting, I recommend you to be very careful regarding connections or electrical assemblies, if you do not have enough knowledge of Electricity please do not try it.

Video: 1# Measurement Electrical Consumption with Ubidots Industrial & ESP32 + PZEM-004T

Create an account in Ubidots Industrial

In a few seconds I created a test account in industrial Ubidots.

Official Website: ubidots.com

Ubidots Industrial

Unlike the Educational version, the Industrial version has more features that facilitate not only the visualization of information but also the analysis and processing of data, better grouping for applications of hundreds of devices, then I will mention some of the characteristics of the platform:

  • List of table in devices: A better design to manage thousands of devices
  • Device types: It's like a template for devices, where you define variables and properties to apply each time a new device is created
  • Device groups: Possibility of grouping devices for actions in pothole
  • Global events: Possibility of creating an event that applies to an entire group of devices
  • New dashboards: Redesigned dashboards, with date picker at the dashboard level and not at the individual widget level.
  • Dynamic dashboards: Possibility of having a device drop down by dashboard and, when changing it, all the widgets are updated.
  • Voice call alert

The industrial version would easily allow designing solutions or applications in agriculture, automated manufacturing, education, health, home automation, manufacturing processes and smart cities.

Tests Performed

The objective of these tests is to make the record of electrical consumption measurements in an uninterrupted way of my house and have an approximate reference or estimated in costs.

I simply want to compare my measurements, calculate costs and compare with local billing and really observe how much they consume the appliances and in the process generate a bit of awareness in the process.

The cost of kilowatt-hour in my city or zone is in my case $ 514 COP or 0.16 USD approximately, for now I will simply multiply the $ 514 COP for the kWh of the meter, later I could calculate the cost hour by hour, day, week and month.

You have to be realistic a house does not consume too much compared to the industry where this application would have good results, with industrial Ubidots could register 500 machines with one meter each without problems.

Materials

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