Feature request: real-time charts for pulse counts.

[johndoe531]

The real-time chart for electricity is the most-useful format for analyzing electrical energy usage by time of day.

Please add real-time charts widgets to Encompass.io for pulse inputs. I'd like to be able to see what times of day water & natural gas are being used, and at approximately what rate of use per minute. One can try to interpolate this info mentally by looking at a continously-rising total-counts chart but it's not intuitive, and not scalable as pulse counts rise into the 100s, 1000s, and beyond.

Because the time scales / rates of use may vary widely by pulse type & end user, please consider making the time & pulse scales widely adjustable to suit needs of different users.

I.e. for my application the natural gas meter is pulsing maybe once a minute, whereas a water meter with a 0.1 gallon per pulse output may be sending 20-40 pulses per minute.

Thanks.

[Jameson]

It sounds like you may want a real-time line chart that shows the water meter flow rate. Does that sound right? At this point we do not have a great way to do that. The closest we have is the EKM Widget setup to show the Pulse Count as an always rising line chart of the Pulse Counts.

Here is an example: https://widget.ekmmetering.com/EKM2/?re ... _lines=341

So far we do not have real-time pulse count data in encompass.io. The always rising nature of the pulse count data would be confusing to some. But someday we would like to be able to have a line chart that shows the pulse rate instead. This data is only available from the EKM ioStack pulse inputs, not the Omnimeter Pulse v.4 inputs.

Screen Shot 2025-02-10 at 5.23.09 PM.png (844.89 KiB) Viewed 25360 times

[johndoe531]

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, a real-time chart for pulse counters (water or gas or anything else) is what I'd like to have available in Encompass if it was possible.

I realize there is a difference between a kWh meter, which outputs both an instantaneous Watt measurement and a train of pulses, vs. the pulse counter inputs, which only count pulses.

I suggest the way to implement a workable near-real-time chart for pulse counters would be to program the Encompass.io (and/or other parts of the EKM cloud infrastructure) to back-integrate the pulse counts over a selectable time window, and then graph the results of the sequential integrations.

-----

If that is unclear, here's an example, assuming an integration look-back window of 1 minute. (But this could be user-configurable to 10, 15, 60 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours, 24 hours, even multiple days or weeks depending on the application, i.e. the average pulse rate in question.)

Timestamps in minutes and seconds:

00:00 - 01:00 - 4 pulses counted.
01:00 - 02:00 - 7 pulses counted.
02:00 - 03:00 - 1 pulse counted.
03:00 - 04:00 - 9 pulses counted
....
and so on.

The "real time" chart would be shown with 1-minute intervals, each data point being the total pulse count for that time interval alone.

E.g. the chart would rise and fall just like the kWh electric realtime chart does:

4, 7, 1, 9.

------

If my example is unclear let me know and I'll do an actual graph mock-up & post a screenshot of same.

Appreciate your time / responses.

[Jameson]

Thanks, I think your idea could work if there were always multiple pulses per minute (maybe in the case of an electric meter for example). But in most cases for water meters the pulses per minute are zero or usually zero (particularly if the water meter is a non-HD model). So that is the issue that is tricky to get around.

Here is a real-time csv file for the EKM Widget that I posted earlier. It is for the latest 2000 1 per minute reads, the max pulses per minute is 6, the average pulses per minute is .139 pulses per minute.

https://api.ekmpush.com/readmeter?key=M ... 0300004127

If I chart the data as pulses per minute it looks like this (newest data on the left). I find it difficult to extract much value from it:

Screen Shot 2025-02-10 at 11.51.18 PM.png (373.42 KiB) Viewed 25227 times

Let me know if you have any ideas! We always appreciate them.

[johndoe531]

Thanks for your detailed reply including a sample graph.

I see what you mean for the case of very low pulse-count meters.

I'll examine my own pulse count outputs & records over the coming weeks and months (for hot/cold water, and for natural gas) and see if there are any integration windows that make more sense. (I.e. binning the pulse counts into 5, 10, 15, 30, 60-minute, or even larger "windows".)

No further reply needed or requested until I can demonstrate a mock-up use case for this. (I have a good graph-making software, DataGraph for Mac, that will allow me to produce sample graphs easily.)

[Jameson]

Happy to help if we can!

For water meter data we tend to look at the 15 minute or hourly data. Its usually enough to let you know if there is an issue (a leak, unexpected usage, or an issue with the pulse counting)

Here is what 15 minute data for 2 days looks like:

Screen Shot 2025-02-11 at 5.39.52 PM.png (818.15 KiB) Viewed 24699 times

Here is what hourly data for a week looks like:

Screen Shot 2025-02-11 at 5.39.40 PM.png (776.75 KiB) Viewed 24699 times

[johndoe531]

Actually, those 2 views of pulse data (as bar charts) are quite useful. Please consider adding those to the Encompass.io dashboard widgets for Pulse meters, including the ability to expand the widget full-width, the way the Electric kWh real-time widget is. Also make it possible to manually-adjust the time slicing to 15 mins, 1 hour, 2 hours, 6 hours, and 24 hours.