CurrentCost Envi and Prolific Drivers

This short article is being written on the off-chance it’s of help to anyone having the same problems as I’ve been having with the Envi CurrentCost Energy Meter

Our setup

• Monitor: CurrentCost Envi Power Monitor
• Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
• Software: Techtoniq Energy Station v2.05
• Connectivity: USB

The Problem

The Techtoniq software fails to detect the Envi unit and no data is captured.

Assuming the Envi is powered and plugged in correctly, this may be a driver issue, and it first started to cause us a problem after an automatic Windows Update. It seems that Windows had found a better USB driver online and overwritten the current driver with a new one. Here’s how the problem manifests itself…

Looking in Control Panel > Device Manager reveals that there is a problem with the drivers ( shown by a yellow cross next to unknown driver)

CurrentCost – Prolific driver problem in Device manager

The fix was to install the old Prolific Serial-to-USB drivers for the Current Cost Envi, which can be found here: CurrentCost Software Downloads – It’s not quite straightforward though

Re-installing the Prolific PL-2303 USB driver

• First, with the Envi connected, uninstall the faulty driver from Control panel > Device Manager
• Next, unplug the USB lead
• Now, install the new driver from the Current Cost site (above)
• Then, plug the USB lead back in – but be ready for the next bit, as you only have a few seconds
• Important bit! Windows will detect the new hardware and look for drivers. By default, it will look online for new drivers – you must stop this! Click on the “Installing drivers” dialog and click the “Skip obtaining driver software from Windows Update” bit, as per the screenshot below.

Prolific Driver – Skip Windows Update search

Skipping the installation of the latest Windows version of the Prolific driver seems to be the key here. If you do this, you should see a message indicating a successful driver installation.

CurrentCost – Prolific Driver correctly installed

For us, that solved the problem. Starting up Techtoniq Energy Station caused the software to find the Envi and all was well.

Hope that’s a help. If you’re having problems, please add a comment in the box below.

There is a related issue that you may also encounter – see below

Techtoniq “Root Element is missing” error

This is a rather irritating message that we’ve encountered a couple of times with Techtoniq Energy Station v2.0

Techtoniq Energy Station – Root Element is missing error

This problem seems unconnected with the  driver issue, but we keep hitting it whilst trying to fix Envi driver issues. Our assumption is that this is to do with the Techtoniq profile getting damaged by having to reboot the machine – the file may not be closed correctly during the numerous reboots and so gets corrupt.

The profile file is a 2k file that you can open and close via the File menu on the Energy Station application. It has a .ESW on the end. Restoring to a backup of this file, or even creating a new one, seems to resolve the problem.

Hopefully this page was useful. Got a comment or question? Please add it in the box below