Energy Display Meter

[Butuz]

I think a lot of folk in general just don't know how it works. A collegue of mine was driving us up the motorway last week at 70mph, windows down and air con on full. I didn't want to rock the boat.

 

Isn't that the way your supposed to drive in the sun??? Air con in the car is effectively free anyway it only saps of a maximum of about 1% of your engine's BHP or to put it a different way bleeds off about the same amount of power as if you had a curry the night before and had not yet .. errr... expelled it

 

Butuz

[d13373d]

As it's been resurrected, has anyone managed to install this centrally and got it to work? (Can't be bothered to go round to each machine). Or got an MSI?

 

If I install to netprogs it hangs looking for the device.

 

Can be installed centrally but takes a bit of work.

I installed a local copy, copied the contents of the program files directory to the network share.

 

Then: Navigate to this folder - c:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerTrust

copy the "Energy Dashboard.cfg" to the network share. This is the file that is creating the Flash player not finding the logger error.

 

Have the file copied to the local PCs via startup script and provide users with the link to the index.html file.

 

Example script used:

if exist c:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerTrust goto end

mkdir c:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerTrust

 

copy "\\cpsictserver\software\For all\Energy Dashboard\Energy Dashboard.cfg" "c:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerTrust\Energy Dashboard.cfg" /y

 

:end

[LeMarchand]

Cheers, I'll give this a go sometime this week.

[Sylv3r]

We never did get our energy monitor... I'll ask the caretaker if he has any news and whether we are likely to get it now the change of government.

[pete]

We never did get our energy monitor... I'll ask the caretaker if he has any news and whether we are likely to get it now the change of government.

 

The project appears to be closed / cancelled now: http://www.energydisplaymeter.co.uk/

[IT_Monkeh]

Ours was installed yesterday - has anyone experienced problems getting it to pick up an IP from DHCP? So far it's stubbornly clinging on to its default IP and I can't see any way to 'reboot' the meter in the hope it would go for a DHCP address on its way up. I can connect the software to it if I give a PC on the network an IP compatible with the meter's default one, so it is basically working apart from the IP.

Apparently, the installer chap didn't test the meter over the network, just left us the software on a usb stick... :/

[speckytecky]

Ours was installed a couple of weeks ago - not been able to get the teachers to have a gander at he lesson plans yet but As a Green Flag Eco School the dashboard is already throwing up some useful data:

[Butuz]

That's great specky. Would love one of these here might have to get on to the energy company!!!

 

Butuz

[IT_Monkeh]

Ours was installed yesterday - has anyone experienced problems getting it to pick up an IP from DHCP? So far it's stubbornly clinging on to its default IP and I can't see any way to 'reboot' the meter in the hope it would go for a DHCP address on its way up. I can connect the software to it if I give a PC on the network an IP compatible with the meter's default one, so it is basically working apart from the IP.

Apparently, the installer chap didn't test the meter over the network, just left us the software on a usb stick... :/

It seems the solution was to leave the meter alone for a long time! It finally picked up its reserved IP at some point over the weekend.

[IanT]

I canceled this order after months and months of chasing for a installation date, so disorganized it was unreal!

[SimpleSi]

I've just got this installed in one of schools.

 

When you run the software on a machine it seems very flaky as to whether it finds the meter on the 1st attempt.

 

If you manually stick in the IP then it find it but thats not very pupil friendly

 

But the main problem is that it doesn't seem to be reacting to any changes we are making (e.g no difference in any reading with suite air con./all computers on and everything off)

 

We found an electric heater and that made no diff either so I think ours may be a bit a broken of the lag time is beyond my attention span

[browolf]

Ours was installed today.

 

what we don't understand:

 

1. the real time power consumption is approx 50% more than what shows per half hour on the comparison page. It just doesn't fluctuate enough to make the average that much lower.

 

2. when we turned off 300 computers the power consumption dropped very gradually over half an hour or more. it wasn't a sudden drop.

 

any ideas on these why?

[SimpleSi]

I'm starting to think that they are just rubbish

 

Si

[RobMongoose]

Ours was installed yesterday - has anyone experienced problems getting it to pick up an IP from DHCP? So far it's stubbornly clinging on to its default IP and I can't see any way to 'reboot' the meter in the hope it would go for a DHCP address on its way up. I can connect the software to it if I give a PC on the network an IP compatible with the meter's default one, so it is basically working apart from the IP.

Apparently, the installer chap didn't test the meter over the network, just left us the software on a usb stick... :/

 

I'm having the same issue at one of my schools. There is allegedly a bloke coming out to give it a static IP, but we shall see. Also, if you get in touch with their techy people, they should be able to give you an MSI to distribute. Still waiting to see if this is actually going to work...

[Silvor]

Does anyone know of any alternatives to this? Looks like it could be useful but the project has seemingly ended.

[browolf]

Ours was installed today.

 

what we don't understand:

 

1. the real time power consumption is approx 50% more than what shows per half hour on the comparison page. It just doesn't fluctuate enough to make the average that much lower.

 

2. when we turned off 300 computers the power consumption dropped very gradually over half an hour or more. it wasn't a sudden drop.

 

any ideas on these why?

 

Had a brainwave. I think I know why it seems a bit rubbish.

 

on the comparison page. each bar on the chart is only a kilowatt half hour.

 

on the real time view, I think it doesn't drop off suddenly when you turn stuff off because each point is something like the average of the preceding hour.

[stevenlong1985]

its an Awful product! I have the software however the software cant find the device, sometimes it will work for about 5 mins and thats it! their engineers kept saying its your computer, its your firewall! its just doesn't work!

[SimpleSi]

If you go into your 'leccy cupboard, there is a white meter with an lcd display. IF you push the buttons you can see kW and Amps being consumed on each phase - the values on mine are much more realistic than the software says they are e.g 35-45kw total power drain at 10am in a 1 form entry school.

 

I'd love to use this to identify the main power consuming devices but its just not reliable.

 

Si

[SimpleSi]

Just had a 2 hours session with a engineer goign around checking installs - one of my schools had had it installed and kept it a little secret

 

So, anyway - it dodn't work and after much faffing it was down to a loose connector inside the logger.

 

But bit of good news, I told him about my other school not showingthe right readings and he says it'll be a faulty logger and he's off their tomorrow to fix it

 

So at this school, 1/2 form entry, built in 1066 or thereabouts, we are consuming 33amps down a single phase!

 

He modified the setup to remove the false other 2 phase readings

 

regards

Simon

[morganw]

We had one fitted a few weeks ago, worked for 10 minutes then stopped. To get it to that point took two 'engineers' about 4 hours. They had no concept of networking, just got it to work on a laptop with a default static IP address, didn't work on our network. I reported the fault last week, heard nothing since. I can't ping it and the software can't find it.

[LeMarchand]

Yep, the 3 sites of mine that got them have all had them pack up. If the scheme is dead, I guess they're none to worried about sorting it out.

[localzuk]

Yup, ours broke overnight after the first night, and its not yet been repaired.

 

The 2 engineers also knew nothing about networking and said that they'd been told that it had a fixed IP address that couldn't be changed. Spoke to a guy at British Gas and he said 'the engineers should have programmed a new static IP address into it, as DHCP will stop working'...

[SimpleSi]

The engineer yesterday couldn't find the setting to enable DHCP so he just gave it a static one.

 

Si

[dthomas]

We have just had ours fitted. Sadly the electrician put in 255.255.255.0 as the subnet mask when ours is 255.255.252.0 so the software cannot see the meter but we have been unable to get anything to connect to it, even a laptop connected directly to it (having changed the snm to 255.255.255.0, of course). Any ideas how we might rescue the situation??

It is disappointing that the software does not easily make the data available in html format via IIS or similar, though.

[LeMarchand]

Those of you that got an engineer back out, how did you get hold of them?