Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 15—Power Track
10 The Home Control Assistant
For the Power Meter, the tab appears a bit differently than other devices. Here you specify:
 How often to poll the device to read out the accumulated power
 The name of the device the meter is connected to. This name is used for the filename of the
power track file and also used in graphs. This way if you want to relocate the power meter to
a different appliance you can just change the name of the appliance it is attached to and you
need not rename the Power Meter device in HCA. And because the power track file uses the
appliance name, you don’t lose the data from the previous usage of the meter nor does the old
appliance’s data get mixed in with the new one.
You can also use this tab of the dialog to read the device and see the current load and accumulated
power.
Here is an important point about the power meter that is best shown by an example:
Suppose the meter records an accumulated power of 100 watt/hours at 10am. Suppose the meter is
read again at noon – a poll of every 120 minutes. At that time the accumulated power is 500
watt/hours
You can’t tell if the device was off – accumulating no power – for example, from 10 to 11:15 and
then turned on and the 400 watt/hours were accumulated in the next 45 minutes.
Because of this, when the graph is constructed for this device, HCA assumes that the power is
accumulated evenly over the time period – that is, 200 watt/hours from 10 to 11, and 200
watt/hours from 11 to noon.