Current Cost Support Forum

Here in the UK, it's the opposite.

We receive £0.433 per kWh generated, + and additional £0.030 for each kWh assumed to be exported (50% in most cases, as they don't bother fitting an export meter).

UK electricity for me in the east of england costs £0.09777 kWh during daylight hours if you're on a two rate system, so it's more beneficial to be using the electricity rather than exporting it.

I don't think that will be a problem in the winter, but the summer is more difficult.

Regarding live_sol, are you planning to sell it or for it to be freeware?

Just a quick followup...

After making my own receiver for Current Cost transmitters, taking apart an EnviR and an IAM, and sniffing SPI data from an EnviR, I am 99.999% certain that CC IAMs only contain a transmitter and hence cannot do collision avoidance or recover from dropped packets. Hence, basically, it seems that it's not possible to use CC IAMs if you require reliable data transmission.

The good news is that the EDF EcoManager Wireless Transmitter Plugs (made by Current Cost) are much better behaved. They contain transceivers and only transmit after being pinged by the base station; hence avoiding collisions. (But the EDF kit isn't compatible with the CC kit).

Full details in the "Current Cost" category on my blog: http://jack-kelly.com/taxonomy/term/121

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Hiya Bob,

Sorry for not replying to your quesions on my blog - I've been away at a conference for the past few days, sorry!

If you haven't done so already, I'd definitely recommend posting to the JeeLabs forum, e.g. this thread: http://forum.jeelabs.net/comment/9316

Well done for taking the brave step to trying to use a software-configurable radio for this stuff: sounds like fun! Unfortunately I have zero experience with software radio so I probably wont be much help...

I'm afraid I'd have to agree that your data doesn't look like Current Cost data. As far as I know, all Current Cost data starts with 55 2D D4 (the 55 is the preamble, the 2DD4 is the sync word). And yes, you're right, the only valid bit pairs in a Manchester-encoded signal should be 01 or 10 (so any pairs of 11 or 00 are illegal and suggest something is broken).

I've had a quick tinker with your waveform and can't make heads nor tails of it, sorry. My only suggestion would be to find out precisely what your Current Cost TX is sending over the air by sniffing FSK data directly from the FSK input pin on the Current Cost transmitter's RFM02 module (but be very careful to isolate your computer from the transmitter; and I'd recommend taking apart a battery powered TX rather than an IAM). You might be able to use the audio-input on a sound card to sample from the transmitter's FSK pin (after isolating appropriately of course... maybe using an audio transformer?) I think the Current Cost transmitter sends a sequence of logical zeros and ones to the transmitter over the FSK input pin; ready for the transmitter to create an FSK signal.

Good luck - let us know how you get on!

Great work - thanks for the update!