How to harvest data from your energy monitors

Overview

ZEFNET is a rich platform that can ingest data, make decisions, and deploy control to achieve your organizations objectives.  This article will talk about the ingestion of data from a new type of device: the energy monitor.  Your organization may have few or many energy monitors in it's buildings, and ZEFNET is able to harvest data from an unlimited number of these monitors and store the data in one place.  One the data is being collected in ZEFNET, it can then be used to report on, or use it as a basis of control for your groups of load devices.  This article will walk you through how to add a new energy monitor and register a new data feed.

Process

We are going to:

1. Locate the data harvesting interface

2. Register the energy monitor

3. Pick the data feeds to synchronize

4. Classify the each data feed

Step 1: Locate the Data Harvesting interface

Step 2: Add New Feed

Click the "Add" button to start creating a new feed.

Step 3: Add connection details

Enter the details of the energy meter you are connecting to.  The connectivity type is only metadata and does not currently affect the energy meter is connected to.  Hit the Test Connection button, and if the Verified icon comes back, hit Next.

Step 4: Select Data Feeds (aka Device Selection)

Some energy meters have multiple data feeds, or sub-devices, to choose from.  Specify the feeds/sub-devices of interest in this tab and hit Next.

Step 5: Associate With Host

Choose the host site/address that the data feeds need to be associated with.  If you need to create a new host site, hit the Add icon.  Once the site host has been clicked and the row highlighted, hit Save.

Step 6: Assign Device Type

Now that the date feeds are registered, the final step is to edit the data feed to assign the correct device type.  First, click on the row with the yellow triangle (which denotes the type of device/feed is unknown). Once highlighted in blue, press the edit icon (which looks like a pencil).  This will open up the dialog to allow us to assign the device type.

Step 7: Edit Type

This is an opportunity to update the feed alias to something more easily identifiable (e.g. West Garage PV).  In addition, the Device Type field is updated.

Step 8: Type Selection

The selection of device types in the drop down is as below.  Choose one of these to associate with the data feed.

Step 9: Model and Manufacturer

The final, optional, part of the feed details are for Manufacturer and Model details of the equipment that is represented by this feed.  Once populated, hit Save.

Step 10: Review

Now that the data feed has been updated to show what device type the feed represents (in this case solar), the icon representing the feed has transitioned from a yellow triangle to solar panel icon, as can be seen below.

Summary

This article showed us step-by-step how to add new data feeds to the user interface, and how to edit their metadata.  Data feeds have lots of different use cases, including, but not limited to: load synchronization, data reporting, mass data harvesting, to name a few.  Be sure to check out some of the other articles to see how you can use your new data feed.