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Smart Breakers

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David Price
(@svcatalyst)
New Member
Joined: 1 year ago
Posts: 2
Topic starter  

i want to be able to monitor power at the breaker level.  My home distribution panel has breakers that have built in Energy Monitoring and an App to view them all. I need DIN mounted, 48VDC.  I own a large Cat w/approx. 50 breakers.  Though would probably only want to monitor some of the larger loads, e.g. AC, Refrig, Water Pumps, ...  Does such an animal exist.

Thank You


   
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Steve Mitchell
(@stevemitchell)
Member
Joined: 6 years ago
Posts: 108
 

Hi David, 

There are marine-grade solutions for this in the form of CZone, Maretron MPower and others. Compared to home IoT stuff, they are quite a bit less mature, and can be frustrating to setup and configure. But, they are marine grade with protections and capabilities that most home solutions don't even have in their designs. These solutions in most cases displace the breakers that you have now, which can be expensive and add some complexity in the installation, but offer some interesting benefits beyond just the monitoring. 

There are also solutions that could provide individual circuit monitoring via transducers and place the info on a NMEA 2000 or other boat type network, but they would be somewhat expensive depending on the number of circuits you are monitoring.

IoT or home-based solutions aren't out of the question to use here depending on the type of breaker and electrical system you have, and how modern things are. Using stuff from SmartThings or other vendors and using Signal K or Home Assistant to bridge that information to other networks on the boat is something I do myself.

Editor, SeaBits.com


   
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David Price
(@svcatalyst)
New Member
Joined: 1 year ago
Posts: 2
Topic starter  

Thanks, Its a brand new boat so switching to digital switching would be a large project and beyond my level of curiosity of where my power is going.  Monitoring VDC appears to have less easy prepackaged options.  I'll keep searching.


   
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