A new on-line monitoring system.

Home energy systems need to be monitored; they need to be monitored not least because it is satisfying to know how much energy you are producing and how it is being used, but also because monitoring can be critical in picking up small problems before they become big problems.

In operating my Powerspout, since it was commissioned I have relied on the on-line visibility of the power being produced to know when to change nozzles. As the header tank begins to empty so the power generated begins to drop, - not by much, only by about 5 Watts. But it is enough for the downward trend in the data seen on my iPad to tell me I need to change to a smaller nozzle.

With this being a key observation for me to run my scheme efficiently, imagine my consternation when, at the start of 2026, the company which had been hosting the output of my turbine, decided it was time to close down the service they had been giving. Suddenly I was in the market for a new system to replace what was no longer available.

This blog is about the new system I found. I am enthusiastic about it and want to make known the company marketing it in case others might be interested in following the same path. If you click where it is written "Live Power and Energy" on this blog page, you'll see the new 'Dashboard' provided by the company. It displays the power and energy being produced by my Powerspout in real time and is updated every 10 s.

The hardware capturing my Powerspout's output.

The system is provided by OpenEnergyMonitor.org. The company provides all kinds of monitoring, from simple systems like mine where there are only two data feeds, power and energy, to whole house systems where feeds can come from solar generation, individual house loads, room temperature sensors, EV chargers, heat pumps and more.

The company is based in Wales, UK and when you buy products from them the deal is that 20% of the value of what you've bought is credited to you against the charge for them hosting your data on the web. Each feed you sign up to costs GBP 1 per year (excluding VAT, 1.20 with VAT). The cost of the kit I purchased, which was GBP 345 excluding VAT, has therefore given me credit of GBP 69. I have two feeds at a VAT inclusive cost of GBP 2.40 per year, so that gives me 29 years worth of web hosting included in the cost of buying the hardware (calc 69/2.4). 

The guys behind the company are super helpful. I received much help, willingly given, to get my system up and running. Being an 'open source' data handling enterprise, if you have the computer skills to set things up yourself, then so much the better. I don't have those skills but with their support, all went smoothly.

The 'dashboard' accessed via this blog page is the way of publishing your data for anybody to view it, but it is not the only way of accessing your data. From the account you open with OpenEnergy when you purchase from their on-line shop, you have secure access to the raw data of your system, and you can make graphs, choose time frames and make downloads. It is a very versatile platform and much better than what I had before. The picture below is an example of how detailed the view can be of the power coming from my turbine.

A detailed, more granular view of the power output in Watts from my turbine.

Here in Wales, the rain is incessant. Last month I recorded 271 mm. That makes January 2026 amongst the top 5 wettest months in the 12 years I've been keeping records.

Of course, it's good news for electricity generation. It has been the month where we have used the least energy from the grid ever, just 12.6 kWh.

And the revenue earned in Feed in Tariff (GBP 267) has contributed most of the cost of my new monitoring.

Happy days !

Year end results for 2024-25 water year.

 For those few people around the world who search the internet for good data on how productive domestic scale micro-hydro is, here are my figures for the past year.

As years go, it has been a dry year in terms of rainfall, and the turbine's output has consequently been not as good as some years. The year end figures were saved from being too bad by the year starting off very wet and this meant that a good deal of the year's total energy was generated by the end of February. After that, rain became scarce and generation steadily declined for the remainder of the year.

Nevertheless, with 4534 kWh generated, I can't grumble.

In each graph, the bold black line represents data from the 2024-25 water year (Oct 2024 to Sep 2025).

1. Daily output (mean power W = total daily energy kWh / 24)

2. Cumulative energy output (kWh)

3. Power duration curve (number of days generating at measured levels of power output)

4. Whole year rainfall vs whole year energy generated.

Penstock pipeline purging.

I hadn't been thinking that silt accumulation would have amounted to much in the penstock delivering water to my Powerspout. Yes, I did do 'flush throughs' to remove silt back in 2014 and 2018, but I haven't done one since.

But as the years have clocked by since 2018, I and others began to notice that power output for each nozzle was getting to be less in each successive year; this was most noticeable for the biggest nozzle - which used to generate over 900W in the winter months, but by 2024/5 was only producing 885 W.

There were a number of possible explanations for this fall-off in generation, - wear on the pelton runner, or changes I had made to the algorithm in the grid-tied inverter, - but when I'd excluded these, the only likely cause remaining was silt accumulation in the penstock.

So this week I set about flushing through the penstock thoroughly.

In previous 'flush-throughs' I had either removed the turbine completely from its plinth or only flushed from the top nozzle holder; this time I wanted a way of doing it which didn't disturb the turbine's seating on the plinth and which flushed the more important bottom nozzle, - which is the one in constant use. The pipe bend in the picture is 2" bore and it attaches to the 2" BSP parallel threading of the nozzle holder with a 2" union, - which has BSP taper threads.

The silt seems to have been cleared from the pipeline in the first few seconds but to be sure, we did two header-tank-fulls of flushing, with each full tank being 6 cubic metres, - it discharged in just 4m 30s.

Afterwards, it was gratifying to see that electrical generation had been improved.

Before flushing, the ac watts generated from the grid-tied inverter was 391.5 W, and afterwards it was 418.5 W; that's 27 W of improvement, representing an improvement in water-to-wire efficiency from 50.7 to 54.1%. 

Pre-flush:

Post-flush:

I'm going to make 'penstock pipeline purging' a yearly maintenance job from now on, alongside the need to de-silt the header tank each year.