EKM Metering

I thought I would post my idea for your Omnimeter, This is more of a feature suggestion than anything else, but if anyone has a suggestion on how to accomplish this, that would be great as well.

It seems it won't do what I want directly, but I thought I would post it because I think it would add more functionality to the product. I have had 'bad power' on occasion, the worst case has been when the incoming power has dropped down to 50% of it's normal voltage, meaning my 220V lines were only putting out about 110V and my 120v lines were only putting out about 60v... This is one of the WORST cases for electrical power, a BROWN OUT.. ugh.. One day I was walking along outside and happened to walk past my A/C condenser unit.. it happened to want to kick on at the time, but instead of starting, I heard a VERY loud Humming.. I knew exactly what it was, it was trying to start, but couldn't.. I immediately thought the start capacitor blew, so I quickly killed it's circuit breaker and continued to what I was doing, I would check on the capacitor later... but then I realized my air compressor was also humming loudly.. I ran to kill it's power too, and then I ran to turn off my main breaker.. in order to save the motors on my refrigerator, freezer, and all my electronic devices. I grabbed my volt meter and that's when I measured my incoming power was bad. So.. it turns out that NO POWER is much much better than BAD POWER, because in a blackout, your stuff isn't all being destroyed.

So I came up with a solution... A 200Amp Shunt Trip circuit breaker before my main panel. For those who may read this who don't know what it is, it's a huge circuit breaker with two little wires sticking out the side, when you apply power to the two wires it uses an electromagnet coil inside the breaker to force it to trip, after that, you have no power, and you need to reset it as you would a normal circuit breaker.. turning it fully off, then back on. These are common devices however, they do not trip on their own unless the current through them exceeds the rating of the breaker, so you need something else to trip it if you want to use it as a brown out eliminator, so what I'm trying to come up with (hopefully using an omnimeter) would be a way to trip the shunt trip breaker if my voltage goes out of range of what I am happy with, so it will trip if it goes above 130 or below 105 volts to neutral on either of the two hot legs. the thing I like about an Omnimeter, is I can record all power conditions, and if I hook up the voltage supply to a point before the shunt trip breaker, perhaps through fuses, I can continue to monitor the situation and decide when I feel the power is stable enough to go out and turn the breakers back on. Obviously I would need battery backup on whatever I was using to continue to monitor the omnimeters. It seems that omnimeters have all the hardware needed to do this, but they aren't programmed to do it, although I'm curious if a firmware upgrade could be incorporated to make them do it. If so, they would not only be the great energy meters they are, but they would also provide an elegant solution to brownout protection as well!

I've been trying to think of a way I could do this, as an electronics engineer... so I've been thinking about reading the omnimeter with a PLC let it compare the voltage readings and make a multiple reads to make sure an event is real and then trip the shunt trip breaker, but then my PLC is busy with all kinds of other stuff, so maybe I'll just get a PIC processor with an RS485 interface and program it to monitor the voltage.. well, this is all well and good and I think I could get it to work... but it has one major drawback... and that is, mine will be the only one doing it. How much better it would be if the omnimeter did it directly, and any electrician who didn't know a thing about programming PLCs or microcontrollers could install a shunt trip breaker and hook it up to on omnimeter and provide an elegant solution to brownouts.

Yes, I think this is a good idea.

It is similar to this question you asked in a different post http://forum.ekmmetering.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3467:

Is there a way I could somehow set the output on an Omnimeter to turn ON if the incoming voltage either rises above 135Volts to neutral?:

At this point no, the best we can do for now is to setup a "trigger" using the EKM Dash. You can setup the EKM Dash to send you an email or text if the voltage were to increase above 135 volts on any line, for x reads in a row. The next step will be for us to develop the option to control a relay output based on triggers as well. Here are some other discussions about this topic:

http://forum.ekmmetering.com/viewtopic. ... gger#p6246
http://forum.ekmmetering.com/viewtopic. ... gger#p6330

But instead of looking for an over voltage situation, you would have the Dash monitor your meter for a low voltage event. You can setup the EKM Dash triggers to "Send an email if the volts on line 1 to neutral is under 100 volts for 3 reads in a row" for example. Relay control comes next. Then you will need to figure out how to get the Omnimeter Pulse v.4 to trip your Shunt Trip Circuit, which should not be too hard I imagine.

I think the best and most reliable solution is to accomplish this with as little hardware as possible, and with as little communications as possible... especially given that for my area where we get hurricanes, the time when you would expect to need it.. like during a tropical storm, internet may be down, and device should still protect regardless....

I posted this separately because the most ideal way to implement this is if the omnimeter did it by itself, then all you would need is maybe an external relay to trigger the shunt trip breaker.. or maybe you wouldn't even need that, I don't think the trip coil uses more than 100mA.. less hardware, less software, less communications = higher reliability and faster reaction time

I realize this would take a bit of re-programmning and possibly different hardware, but perhaps it will be considered as a new feature of future versions of omnimeters.