It seems to be the “in thing” to do at the moment; get a Current Cost electricity meter and produce pretty graphs. I couldn’t resist, so I picked one up with a USB cable to connect it to my server.
The system itself is trivial to install. There’s a box with a clamp that attaches to your mains supply (your side of the house meter), and a display which can be placed anywhere in your house (within the wireless range of the two units). Turn it on and it just works. I adjusted the electricity prices, but it’s not clear how accurate that’ll be given the multiple tiers of pricing we have.
So even without connecting it to a PC it’s a pretty useful device. Although I am developing a habit of running around looking for what’s caused the usage to jump up. Hopefully that’ll pass 🙂
Connecting it to my FreeBSD server took a bit of effort. It needed the ucom module, but (I think) because I had ugen built in to the kernel it was using that instead. A kernel rebuild to include both fixed it. I also got some strange issues connecting to the device. On the first connect I got the expected XML output, but on the second connect I got messed up output. Turns out not to happen when I use my script to parse the data, so I don’t think I’ll worry about it.
I did the graphing using rrdtool. I’d like to take the credit for doing that, but I just stole all of Paul’s work. Thanks Paul 🙂
The excitement has gone now, but I’m sure over time the data will prove to be interesting and useful.
Have you heard about Home Camp? If you’re still interested in CurrentCost-type stuff, you might find it fun – check out http://homecamp.pbwiki.com/
It’s a CurrentCost-themed hackday and unconference – a day’s discussion and hacking for anything related to monitoring energy usage.
Kind regards, D