Home electrical sensor

[M3Man03]

I'm looking for something that is able to determine if an electrical single is present or not through Linux perferrably.

The senerio I'm trying to figure out... I have a hydronic heating system and I want to be able to do some kind of reporting to which zones are requesting heat (I have 3 zones) and at which time of day, also comparitive to the temperature outside.

So, in the simplest broken down form, I just need a way to determine if the zone sensor is on, or if a signal has been sent to it. I know the voltage (24v) of the circuit and I have the temperature thing already solved.

Most of this is done in perl, I just don't have a way to get the information to the system that the zone has been tripped by the thermostat.

So does anyone know of a way to determine or watch a eletrical circuit or query if the circuit is powered in Linux?

 

[signal15]

I'm looking for something that is able to determine if an electrical single is present or not through Linux perferrably.

The senerio I'm trying to figure out... I have a hydronic heating system and I want to be able to do some kind of reporting to which zones are requesting heat (I have 3 zones) and at which time of day, also comparitive to the temperature outside.

So, in the simplest broken down form, I just need a way to determine if the zone sensor is on, or if a signal has been sent to it. I know the voltage (24v) of the circuit and I have the temperature thing already solved.

Most of this is done in perl, I just don't have a way to get the information to the system that the zone has been tripped by the thermostat.

So does anyone know of a way to determine or watch a eletrical circuit or query if the circuit is powered in Linux?

In your hydronic system, you should have a Taco (or similar) pump controller. Mine's a green box that all the thermostats run through. The thermostat wires go closed loop when requesting heat, and open loop when they are not. If you have a system like an ELK, you can hook up an input zone *directly* to the inputs on the pump controller. Of course, you'll wanna make sure yours isn't some weird kind of set up that supplies power over the same pair of wires that are used to control temp.

As far as monitoring it from linux, if you have an ELK, you can get the status messages from it and parse them. If not, I've seen USB I/O boards that were relatively cheap. I don't remember the names of them though, maybe someone here could recommend a cheap I/O board that works with Linux? I'd be interested in getting one to play with also.

What are you trying to do? Is your hydronic boiler gas or electric? Mine is electric and I monitor my usage with a Brultech, but you could do it with a TED5000 also. This just gives me total usage though, I don't know which zone actually requested heat.