Homeseer Gas flow monitoring.

I have a standard Actaris(Itron) U6 gas meter – these are known as “pulse ready”, in other words there’s a little magnet hidden inside the smallest dial which pulses once for every 10 cubic decimetres of gas (one rotation of the smallest dial). 100 Cubic Decimeters(dm3) is 1 cubic meter (M3)

Outlined in red is the “pulse block” which attaches to the meter - this is the official (and expensive) accessory, Inside its just a sensitive reed switch that picks up the magnet as it goes round on the right-most wheel.

There are several web pages where people show alternative ways of getting a pulse from the meter, such as using a photo-electric cell which can be found here:

http://www.bwired.nl/How_rfxcom.asp

http://www.hekkers.net/domotica/howtomonitorgasusage.aspx

In Homeseer3 I have the following virtual devices created, which are used to count the gas pulses and store the charges in the text fields.

The event

The above event fires two scripts, one to increment all the virtual counters and the second script updates the financial counters.

The next event is used to calculate the gas flow per minute.

One counter is gas pulses per minute that triggers a reset event for 60 seconds time and updates another device with the current flow rate:

The next event is triggered from the previous event and is used to store the peak value of the one minute counter (the flow rate) before it gets reset.

The last event is the gas leak detection safety feature – it only works because I ONLY use gas for heating and I have a feedback from the boiler to tell me when it is running. If you have other things using gas, then you would need to amend this event to only monitor when the house is unoccupied or overnight when you don’t expect to see gas flowing.

Please click here to download the VB scripts shown above.