Compute Energy used using a RPICT

We will introduce how Energy can be calculated using a RPICT board. The widely known kWh - Kilo-Watt-hour. Our example will use a RPICT3T1 but this can easily apply to other models.

RPICT being a sensor interface board it does not compute Energy for performances reason. We estimate this sort of computation to be the duty of the recording platform and not the acquisition unit.

With Emoncms you will find this computation readily available. We refer to the Emoncms website for more details about this. This is also possible in Grafana where you can use an integral function to estimate energy from power data source.

Here we will cover the computation of energy using a small Python program.

How energy relates to power

Power is expressed in Watt (W) whereas energy is expressed in Watt-hour (Wh).