Updates on my Energy Monitoring Device Project

I had the good opportunity to find a highly skilled Electronic Technician last Sunday. He did an excellent job and I must say his work is almost an Art because the soldering was very consistent and refined see pictures below.

And because of his superb workmanship, I was able to immediately assemble my project and easily made it work.

I also have started working on the software and it is now is in its early stage development.

The charting control is not yet working.

Energy Monitoring Device with Arduino

Three arduino related products that I ordered from ebay also arrived yesterday. With these 3 amazing products, I can already start developing my Energy Monitoring Device project. This device is a lot  more powerful than the DC Wattmeter and Power Analyzer I featured earlier because it will allow me to monitor the health of my battery bank even when I am away by storing the measured parameters into memory and I will be able to read this stored data later and view it graphically.

The FTDI Basic:

The Arduino Pro Mini:

The Voltage Divider Sensor:

I will first have the leads soldered on the Arduino Pro Mini once that is done, I will now be able to develop the program to allow to it measure voltage across the battery banks.

There's thrill in making things on your own

Today, several items I ordered from ebay 3 weeks ago just arrived. I will use most of them on the projects that I am trying to develop. The first project that I have in mind is to develop my own portable charger with battery bank. Portable chargers can easily be bought from CDR King and a bunch of other stores in SM's Cyber Zone. But I prefer to create my own version.

These are the components that I will use for the project:
1. 5V Mini USB 1A Battery Charging Board Module
2. DC DC Step up USB Module
3. 4 pcs of lithium ion batteries(26650 6000mAh 3.2V)
4. An isolation diode
5. A plastic enclosure
6. Battery holder

Today, I already have items 1 and 2, I am still waiting for the arrival of item 3, I can easily find items 4, 5 and 6 in local electronic stores in Raon.

 

What makes my portable charger different is that I will be connecting the 2 li-ion batteries in parallel and will be boosted its rated 3.2V to 5V which is a typical usb voltage output.

The overall specification of my portable charger is as follows:

1. 24000mAh

2. 5V 500mA output - full size USB

3. 5V 1A input - mini USB

4. Battery Charge LED indicator

Normally, a 24000mAh portable charger will cost 4000 pesos if made in China, more than 8000 pesos if made elsewhere and not bought from CDR King.  My project has a budget of 1000 pesos plus other expenses in sourcing the components and of course my labor fee.

I plan to use the same enclosure I purchased earlier for my step-down dc-dc converter, and together with the components, this is how the finished product is going to look like:

The problem with the enclosure is it will hide the led charge indicator which is fully integrated in the mini usb charger module, so I will try to look for a transparent plastic version if available.

DC Wattmeter is an excellent replacement of Meralco's Kuntador

I never really thought of getting a DC Wattmeter to monitor my electricity consumption but since I am using solar energy, having it is a necessity.

I decided to buy 1 pc from where else but ebay and after 1 month of waiting, it finally arrived. So excitedly, I immediately tried it for 5 days and well, its performance is beyond my expectation. The device I bought tells a lot about the current solar installation setup that was not even possible to know just by using an ordinary voltmeter and the other excellent feature of the device is that it does not even needs a battery to power it up.


I was really so amazed by it that I want to share what I got by selling it locally which I am currently advertising in my sulit.com.ph store. 

My First Ebay Order Arrived Last Week

After almost 2 months of waiting, my first order finally arrived last week. It's a LM2596 Low Ripple DCDC Step Down Adjustable Converter (Wide Input 4-40V) max. 3A.

This is just an electronic widget and so upon receiving, I rushed to Quiapo's Raon and bought a small enclosure and hired a technician to assemble it for me a minimal fee of Php 100. And here is the final product:

This enabled me to charge my 6V vrla batteries to power up my usb fans. Here's my current setup:

  The 6V 19AH battery bank is charged 2hours per day and is enough already to power up the 2 usb fans all day long.

I Upgraded my Solar Installation

I upgraded my solar installation from 180Watts PV + 83AH Battery Bank to 260Watts PV + 170AH Battery Bank. I almost doubled the capacity because I have several new appliances that require the upgrade. These new stuffs that I got is the CCTV set I installed consisting of the DVR(48Watts), 4 security cameras(48Watts) and a TCL 15" LED Tv(20Watts).

My current upgraded solar installation can not support the 24-hr surveilance operation of my CCTV so I bought a mechanical timer to automatically turn on and off my cctv at certain specified period.

I also noticed lately that the location of my PV's is not highly optimized, I am losing at least 1.5 sun hours everyday but because it's almost summertime, that is not really a problem because I am able to get adequate energy to charge my PV's and aside from that, I bought a new Solar Charge controller. This device boosts the voltage output of my PV panels from 12.6V to 14.6V so that it will efficiently charge my battery. It also has features like over-charging protection(it stops charging my battery if it senses that the battery is fully charged), it also isolates my PV panels from my battery bank which means, at night, when there is no sunlight, my PV will have 0 voltage so the tendency is that my battery bank will in turn treat the PV as load, therefore, electric current will flow through my PV and this electric current will damage my PV. But upon buying my PV, I always ask the shop owner to add 6A rectifier diodes to isolate my PV's but this still not enough protection and the solar charge controller simply maximize the level of isolation of my PV's from my battery Bank.

I am also thinking of connecting my Solar Installation to the power grid in the near future just to to do some experimentation since one of the great topics nowadays is the pricing schemes of net-metering. The Philippine Congress and Energy Regulatory Board has not come out with reasonable pricing schemes but the Law on net-metering has already been approved. Probably we will have to wait at least 2 years. So for now, anybody with Solar Installation can enter into a net-metering arrangement with their local electric utility companies but they can not expect any pay at all, but they can expect that their electric bill will go down significantly.  This means that even if they consume far less than they send to the power grid, the excess will serve as a donation.

I did not find it! But I got an alternative solution

After almost a week of hunting, I did not find an existing electronic gadget that I called in-line isolator but I got an alternative solution. I've searched everywhere, almost all electronics stores, online shops and even the wikis, I am so surprised it does not exist.

My solution is quite simple and straight forward but I still need to upgrade it in the future. What I did was, I bought 10 pcs of rectifier diodes which are rated at 6Amps/500Volts and connected them in parallel. The basic idea here, is that all 10 diodes have equal resistance(if any) and therefore the current that will flow in them will be equal, and at the same time having them connected in parallel would mean they can be a lot stronger to withstand any electrical sparks. I am now using it  and it is doing its job flawlessly.

The only problem I encounter is that the power supply has lower output voltage than the battery, so as a result, it will only be effective if its output is boosted up to 14 volts so that it can charge the battery. I feound electronic widgets that will solve this problem and I am still waiting for them to arrive because I imported them from China via ebay.