{"id":98,"date":"2008-11-05T13:10:34","date_gmt":"2008-11-05T13:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/?p=98"},"modified":"2010-11-11T13:01:41","modified_gmt":"2010-11-11T13:01:41","slug":"currentcost-electricity-meter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bishnet.net\/tim\/blog\/2008\/11\/05\/currentcost-electricity-meter\/","title":{"rendered":"Current Cost Electricity Meter"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems to be the “in thing” to do at the moment; get a Current Cost electricity meter<\/a> and produce pretty graphs. I couldn’t resist, so I picked one up with a USB cable to connect it to my server.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I did the graphing using rrdtool<\/a>. I’d like to take the credit for doing that, but I just stole all of Paul’s work<\/a>. Thanks Paul \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The excitement has gone now, but I’m sure over time the data will prove to be interesting and useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A look at the Current Cost electricity meter and how to produce pretty graphs from it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t