Personally I monitor my consumption to change my behaviour so gaps in the data for a few minutes to a couple of days is of no real concern what I’m trying to find is a trend in what we do at home with our thirst for Electricity. This human behaviour of always getting up and putting the kettle on, then having a shower etc is how the National grid predict what is going to happen day after day to ensure there is enough generation to meet demand. So let’s get off CC back when the feed goes down, this is new let’s give it time to develop and we can have a massive hand in that.
Changing our behaviour is critical for when SMART meters are installed and rather than paying a fixed cost per kWh (£0.115) you will pay the BMRS system buy price for that half hour period. (
http://www.bmreports.com/bwx_reporting.htm) the price you see, if you divide that by 1000 then you have your kWh price.
So what’s the answer? Simple! Smooth out when you use electricity as you will pay more during peak periods 0530 - 08:30 and 16:00 - 18:30 in winter up to £1 kWh.
So what do I want on my dashboard to help? I would like to see a week day and weekend average chart line in the background that takes all the spot values I have sent for a given time and divided by the number of days to give me my average. As the daylight hours move so much in the UK I would suggest that this changes monthly so you compare April 2010 V April 2011 this will also demonstrate if your behaviour is changing. I know this is a lot to ask of CC maybe it’s something we can upload from our own data collection?
I also want to show my PV output, my consumption and a resultant import(+flow)/export line(-flow) with running totals for Generation, Consumption, import and export again to persuade the wife to delay putting the washing machine on for 30 minutes so that the PV can meet the demand.
That’s all. Just be patient because if we aggravate Yellow park I’m sure he will be less inclined to deal with your requests and feedback regardless of how important it is I know I would.
Happy MONITORING. Lordmvarder.