RTL-SDR: Logging home energy consumption

I have been using an energy meter for a while to track the energy consumption at home. The system consists of a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter is placed in a meter box with a clamp on the live feed going into the house and the receiver sits in my office. The transmitter transmits the energy consumption in watts(joules/sec) at certain intervals while the receiver converts these readings from the transmitter to energy consumed in KW-hr and tracks the consumption for a day, week, month and year.

While this system works and allows me to track consumption, I wanted a bit more flexibility in the way energy consumption was displayed. For example, one of the requirements was to break down the energy consumption for various times in the day.

There were multiple solutions available.
1) Use energy consumption monitors which also provide a cloud based service reporting on energy consumption. I rejected this as I am locked into using a particular vendor who may one day decide to shut shop.
2) There are some monitors available which allow you to download data off the the receiver which you can then use. This is a manual process which requires you to connect to the device with a USB cable to pull the data.
3) Find another method to capture the data sent by the transmitter directly and process it. This is the method I finally chose.

The energy consumption monitor I have is an Efergy Elite Classic(Bought second hand on ebay for GBP 21). The transmitter operates in the 433 MHz range and can be set to transmit data in 6/12/18 second intervals.
I also purchased a RTL-SDR USB dongle(GBP 11.99, again bought off ebay) which allows me to tune into various frequencies using software on a computer. You can also use the software(I use gqrx on linux) to scan and determine exactly which frequencies have data being transmitted on them.
An idle raspberry pi was requisitioned for this project and will happily use the RTL-SDR dongle.

Looking around for ideas, I came across the project rtl_433 which uses rtl-sdr libraries and has a large number of decoders already in place. It scans the 433 MHz frequency and automatically decodes data packets for any of the various supported devices. The utility already supports the Efergy energy consumption monitor which is a big plus.

Once the dongle is connected and rtl_433 built, we can simply decode calls over the wire with the command

rtl_433 -f 433550000 -R 36

By default, the rtl_433 utility tunes to 433920000 Hz. The Efergy transmitter transmits on 433550000 Hz I have to pass this frequency with the -f option. This is where I used gqrx to determine the frequency which Efergy transmitter transmits on.

The output is of the form

Power consumption at 110 volts: 92.40 watts
Power consumption at 115 volts: 96.60 watts
Power consumption at 120 volts: 100.80 watts
Power consumption at 220 volts: 184.80 watts
Power consumption at 230 volts: 193.20 watts
Power consumption at 240 volts: 201.60 watts

The mains power in the UK is at 240 volts and it shows my consumption at that voltage to be 201.60 watts. The data in watts is then further processed using a combination of grep, sed and a python script and upload it to Thingspeak. 

Thingspeak is aimed at IoT applications. Thingspeak provides you a REST api to record data. This data can be analysed and used as needed. As a bonus, there are a few Android apps available too which can read the data off the Thingspeak platform.

I first started recording the data in watts updating the Thingspeak channel every time the transmitter transmitted. However the resulting graph was difficult to read because of the huge spikes every time I turned the kettle or the microwave on. To give me a better understanding of my energy consumption, I converted the watts to KW-hr and update the Thingspeak channel every hour instead. This gives me consumption for an hour instead. I preferred looking at the readings in KW-hr as my energy company charges me per KW-hr.

The resulting graph: