it's electric will poll a TED 5000 (or TED Pro, or Current Cost) home energy monitoring system for data, store it in a database, and publish it as a graph on a website. You can zoom in and see second-by-second data, even long afterward. It's faster than Footprints and allows finer detail than Google PowerMeter. And, it's easy to make your data publicly available over the web.

See it's electric in action

I worked on this project mainly from 2009 to 2011. I believe it is still useful, and if you have some particular need (or if you're exciting about working on it yourself!), you should let me know.

it's electric has two components: (1) a Java program and (2) a collection of web pages with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

The it's electric Java program is designed to perform two simultaneous activities:

1. it records data from TED (or other device) into a permanent database; and
2. it serves data from the database in Google Visualization API format.

it's electric works with TED 5000 (heavily tested), Ted Pro (somewhat tested), and Current Cost (barely tested).

The it's electric web pages will then talk to the server set up by the Java program in order to display the data as an interactive chart. You can simply view the web pages yourself as files on your computer, or serve them up using a Web server for yourself or the general public to view over the network.

Note that you can also design your own web pages using the Google Visualization API which talk to your it's electric datasource server.

For those not interested in the interactive charts, the it's electric Java program can also export data from the it's electric database in CSV format, which you can then import into other databases or spreadsheets for analysis.

0. Install Java (Mac: automatic; Windows: visit java.com)

1. Extract all files from its-electric-1.10.3-pre.zip.

2. Open the command prompt and cd to the extracted its-electric directory.

3. Type the command: java -jar its-electric-1.10.3-pre.jar -g http://192.168.1.99 -m 2 -d its-electric-db BUT CHANGE "192.168.1.99" to the IP address of your TED Gateway, and change "2" (in "-m 2") to the number of MTUs in your TED system.

(Note: if your TED Gateway is automatically assigned an IP address, you can try using -g http://TED5000 which is known to work on Windows.)

If using TED Pro use arguments like: --device ted-pro --spyders 16

If using Current Cost try "java -jar its-electric-1.10.3-pre.jar -h" to list available options.

4. Open its-electric/web/its-electric.html in your browser (for instance, by double-clicking it).

5. (optional) If you want to monitor voltage, add "-v" to the command in step (3). If you want to monitor kVA, add "-k 2" where 2 is the number of seconds it's electric waits between polls for kVA data. You'll also need to edit "its-electric-config.js" and change "hasVoltage" and/or "hasKVA" to "true".

I've highlighted a couple of posts by users, detailing installation on their platforms, at https://github.com/tupelo-schneck/its-electric/blob/wiki/InstallationAdviceFromUsers.md

1. You'll need to run the it's electric Java program, which polls the TED 5000 (or TED Pro, or Current Cost) for data, stores it in a database along with averages over longer time spans, and runs the server which provides the data according to the Google Visualizations API. The command is:

    java -jar its-electric-{version}.jar [options]
   

The option --device specifies the device. Default is ted-5000, other options are ted-pro and current-cost. Use option -h/--help to list all available options.

The option -d is required, to specify the directory in your filesystem where the database will be stored. Note: the database gets big, on the order of 1GB/month. (More precisely, around 250MB/month/MTU.)

You also may need to specify the -m option to tell it's electric how many MTUs you have (if you have more than one).

For recording data, you may need the -g option to specify the location of the gateway. (The default is http://TED5000. If your TED 5000 has IP address 192.168.1.99 and port 1234, use -g http://192.168.1.99:1234.) If you include option "-v", then its-electric will monitor the voltage data from TED as well as power. If you include "-k 2", its-electric will poll for kVA data every 2 seconds (unlike voltage and real power, kVA data is not included in the TED history data).

For serving data, the -p option allows you to specify the port where the server listens. The default is 8081. Note: -g specifies the URL (generally with IP address and port) where the its-electric server will contact TED; -p specifies the port where the its-electric web pages will contact the its-electric server.

You can specify to only record data using option --no-serve (e.g. for an unattended setup) and to only serve data using option --no-record (e.g. with a static copy of an its-electric database).

To export data from to in resolution , use

   java -jar its-electric-*.jar -d <database-dir> --export <start> <end> <res>

and are expected in ISO 8601 format, for example

   2010-11-05T22:09:37-0400

You can leave off components and it's electric should behave sensibly, e.g.

   java -jar its-electric-*.jar -d <database-dir> --export 2010-08 2010-10 1

will export data for all seconds in August, September, and October.

You can read about other options by using option "--help".

You can also pass options to java itself (before the -jar option). I use

   -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.SimpleLog 
   -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog=trace

to have it's electric dump trace output.

If you have memory issues, consider giving java more memory using an option like -server or -Xmx128M . In fact consider that in any case; I particularly recommend java -server for this.

2. Next you'll need to set up the it's electric web files, in the extracted its-electric/web directory. You may need to edit the file its-electric-config.js file to tell how to contact the datasource server you set up in part (1); it comes looking for "http://localhost:8081" which may work fine for you, but will certainly need to be changed if you want your data accessible over the Internet---it's a client-side process to get the data and pass it to the chart. Change the property "datasourceURL". If you're storing voltage and/or kVA data, change "hasVoltage" and/or "hasKVA" to "true".

Even if you're just looking at the data yourself, you may want to access the files through a webserver. (On a Mac, this just means opening System Preferences to the Sharing pane, turning on Web Sharing, and putting the files in /Library/WebServer/Documents; then you can point your browser at http://localhost/its-electric.html.)

If you do share your it's electric over the Web, make sure you include a link to the source download. If you modify your source, you'll need to make your modified copy available for download, as specified by the GNU Affero General Public License (see legal/COPYING-agpl.txt).

Join the discussion group at http://groups.google.com/group/its-electric-software and share your experiences, feature requests, bug reports, etc.!

The full source of it's electric is included in the its-electric-{version}.jar file. If you unzip it, you'll have a copy of the Eclipse project that I used to develop it, and an Ant build file to recreate it. Please tell me about your modifications, I'm quite likely to include them in future versions! We also have a GitHub project at https://github.com/tupelo-schneck/its-electric/

it's electric: software for storing and viewing home energy monitoring data
Copyright (C) 2009-2015 Robert R. Tupelo-Schneck <schneck@gmail.com>
http://tupelo-schneck.org/its-electric

it's electric is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

it's electric is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with it's electric, as legal/COPYING-agpl.txt. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

it's electric includes third-party code, the various copyright notices and licenses for which may be found in the files in legal/third-party included in the it's electric distribution.