Confused by results

Hi

I just got my system a month ago and have been experimenting to understand how to interpret the results.  I have an emontx v3.  I'm in the US.

 

I'm a bit confused by what I'm seeing, and hoping for some help please - I am trying to capture power consumption on my water well.  The panel has (what I think is) a two-pole circuit breaker - pic below:

Here's the dashboard with the realtime feed.  I have one CT around both wires on breaker and one CT around just one.  If I'm reading the results correctly, they are opposite of each other with the double wire CT showing the sum of the two, which is not what I want (I think).

http://emoncms.org/dashboard/view&id=30429

As a newbe to this, I'm sure I'm making some basic mistakes - help is most appreciated

 

Thanks

 

Scott

Robert Wall's picture

Re: Confused by results

I assume you're running a pump motor. How many wires, not counting a protective earth if there is one, go to the motor? If there are only two, then the motor is running on 240 V, and you only need to look at the CT on the single wire (and it doesn't matter which wire it's on - it'll read negative if it faces the wrong way for the wire it's on). Have you looked at this in Building Blocks? The situation you're in is the 240 V load in Fig.4c.  There's no graph visible to me for the 1-wire CT, so I can't tell whether that looks sensible or not. The CT that's on 2 wires should be reading zero, or very close to zero, and it's redundant. If the vertical scale in your dashboard is watts, then what you're seeing there is just noise or leakage currents, or a bit of both. What's happening is the same current is flowing in both black and white wires but in opposite directions, each is cancelling the other and the sum is zero.

If there are three wires to your pump (2 lines plus neutral - which seems unlikely), then you need to do one of the arrangements in Fig.3 (same Building Blocks article). Fig.3c is the cheapest, needing only one CT and input channel.

You'll probably find "CT sensors - Introduction" and "CT Installation" (both also in Building Blocks) helpful too.

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