Electricity meters – remote monitoring of consumption

If you need to remotely monitor consumption from one or more electricity meters, here is the solution. You need an electricity meter that is equipped with an RS485 bus and the MODBUS protocol. You connect the electricity meter to our GSM-MODBUS-485 device. Three wires are enough for the connection (any communication cable) and the distance can be 100 meters without any problems. GSM-MODBUS-485 is a GSM device into which you insert your SIM card of any operator and this device regularly reads consumption and can send it to your server. Since this method of sending data uses GPRS transmission, it is necessary that data is activated on the SIM. Adjust the tariff to the frequency with which you choose to send data. The frequency and moment of sending are set in GSM-MODBUS-485 using SeaConfigurator. In it, you can configure regular sending using the “Scheduler” of actions in the Cron system (see Example with configuration below).

If you don’t have a server, you can use Google’s free “tables” service, or GOOGLE SPREADSHEET (Google Sheet).

Real-world operation was tested with Carlo Gavazzi EM and ET series electricity meters.

Connection of 19 electricity meters to one GSM-MODBUS-485 was tested. Tested with types EM21 and EM330.