Tellstick and NorthQ Power Reader

Robert AndresenInternet of things 1 Comment

I recently bought a NorthQ Power Reader (NQ-9021-EU) from Proshop. The Power Reader supports Z-wave and should be compatible with Telldus/Tellstick Znet.

The Power Reader reads your power consumption from the power meter in or next to your fuse box. This helps you track your power consumption.

At first, everything looked great, but it has been a long road to get this up and running.

When I received it, I paired it with my Tellstick Znet Lite v2, without any problems – but the first issue was the range to my fuse box where my power meter is located.

The long road to success

To solve the range issue, I bought 3 Telldus Z-wave on/off plugs, as they should work as repeaters. On/off was working, but they didn’t repeat any signal. After contacting Telldus support, they concluded that this has a HW-error, so I returned my plugs and got new ones. Now the repeat-functionality worked… almost… it worked with the plugs themselves and my Fibaro smoke sensor.

It didn’t work with the Power Reader. I contacted Telldus support again and they checked the routing tables on the plugs, without finding anything regarding the Power Reader. The Power Reader just don’t want to «talk» to the plugs – only the controller. If I unplugged my Power Reader from the power meter-sensor and placed it next to my Tellstick Znet controller, the status updated almost right away.

I also have my first Tellstick Znet that’s not in use after I got my v2, so I got a great idea to place this Znet next to my fuse box and just pair the Power Reader to this controller. I excluded the Power Reader from my Znet v2 and tried to start the inclusion process on the first Znet, but nothing happened. The controller didn’t find any device in inclusion-mode.

Again I gave up and contacted Telldus and NorthQ support. While waiting in an answer, I tried to include it on my Znet v2 again. This controller found it, but it just stopped on 1% of the inclusion-process. So at this time, the NorthQ Power Reader didn’t want to pair with any of my two Znet-controllers. I tried everything; resetting the Power Reader to factory default, restart my Tellstick, different browser, etc…

Solution

As I had a Zipabox from Zipato connected to my network also, I just tried to add it on there, to see if the issue was Telldus or the Power Reader. Including the Power Reader on the Zipabox worked right away, without any issues. Then I tried to exclude it from the Zipabox and tried Telldus one more time… and it worked!

Not sure if this is a Telldus or NorthQ issue, but the solution was to include and exclude it on another controller.

The NortQ Power Reader

To understand the setup and how to configure the power meter, you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UICEpJ46oCc (It’s a bit long and boring, but informative).

I just adjusted the 1: Pulse factor and 2. Sensor type under «Configuration» on the device.

The documentation say the default Pulse factor is 10.000, but for me it was predefined on 1.000. So I adjusted this up to 10.000, matching my imp/kWh on my power meter. See the YouTube-video linked above for more information regarding this.

You could also adjust 9: Pulse count, to set a start value matching your power meter. But this is not possible because of the slider-gui on the Telldus live. The slider step is to high and the numbers are on the left side, pushing the slider to the right while dragging. See picture below. Telldus supports tells me that they will fix this sometime in the future.

The keep sensor history don’t seem to work in Telldus Live on this, but in my case I’m probably gonna create a snippet that logs this to an SQL-database anyway.

 

Device:

Sensor:

Device configuration

9: Pulse count issue: