EST. 2026 — Notes from real server work SYSADMIN · SECURITY · AI · DIRECTADMIN Issue 01
THE SYSADMIN ALMANAC
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Energy

#Energy

4 articles
Hardware / IoT
No kWh Meter? Estimate Daily Electricity Costs from Current
Hardware

No kWh Meter? Estimate Daily Electricity Costs from Current

Notes on converting CT current readings into energy usage and daily time-of-use electricity costs, from the three-phase power formula and the sampling interval built into it, through skipping outages and separating peak from off-peak with epoch arithmetic, to a daily summary table that made the web page seven times faster.

#energy#power-meter#electrical#modbus
10 min read·15 Oct
Shared Neutrals Across Transformers: Why Phase Balancing Is Not Enough
Hardware

Shared Neutrals Across Transformers: Why Phase Balancing Is Not Enough

A case involving two transformers with interconnected neutrals and houses tapped into one side's main feeder, leaving phase A 30-40 A higher even on days off, plus a meter-reading trap that can suggest a 200 A difference if the CT ratio is not verified first, and a repair sequence that must be followed in order.

#hardware#electrical#power#engineering
9 min read·30 Sep
Diagnosing Feeder Overload from Melted Insulation and Duty Cycles
Hardware

Diagnosing Feeder Overload from Melted Insulation and Duty Cycles

My investigation of a 95 mm² main cable with insulation melting at scattered points even though the system seemed to work normally, from the nameplates of 6 washers and dryers totaling 234.7 kW to a minute-by-minute current model explaining why a 482 A load on a cable rated for 180 A had not caused a visible system failure.

#hardware#electrical#power#engineering
10 min read·28 Sep
Reading a DTSU666 3-Phase Meter with Raspberry Pi over Modbus RS485
Linux

Reading a DTSU666 3-Phase Meter with Raspberry Pi over Modbus RS485

Notes on connecting a DTSU666 Smart Power Sensor to a Raspberry Pi over RS485, reading 3-phase electrical measurements from multiple meters using Modbus RTU, decoding 32-bit floats correctly, and storing them in SQLite/MySQL before exporting through MQTT and a REST API, including a negative-value bug I ran into myself

#modbus#rs485#iot#dtsu666
11 min read·19 Jul