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Ask HN: Do you use a whole house electricity monitor?
There are plenty of commercial and open source electrical main-feed monitoring solutions out there. Do you use one? What do you like about it?
- jagger27 9y agoCan you give an example of what you mean? I assume you mean something other than the outdoor metering device used by the power company.
- dangrossman 9y agohttps://sense.com/ https://sense.com/
- dundercoder 9y agoSure. Usually a device that clamps onto each phase of the main power feed and sends that info to a local/remote datastore for recall/analysis. Tells you as little as "I'm using X watts now" to sorting out usage using signatures into individual devices. https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/technical/resources/ https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/technical/resources/ https://sense.com/ https://sense.com/
- acct1771 9y agoBesides load/usage double-check, what benefits, if any, does this provide?
- saluki 9y agoI don't yet but I might set this up this summer. https://blog.kroy.io/monitoring-home-power-consumption-for-less-than-25/ https://blog.kroy.io/monitoring-home-power-consumption-for-l...
- joezydeco 9y agoMy home has a radio-connected "smart meter" that also has Zigbee capabilities. For $45 I bought a USB/Zigbee dongle that spits out XML-formatted information from the meter. With no change to my wiring I can monitor whole-house usage with about 4 watt-hours of resolution. But I don't really do much with it. I thought about putting together a little LCD panel that shows consumption vs grid price (I opted to pay real-time prices). But I still don't know what benefit it would have unless I really wire the whole house to use that data (e.g. turn off lights, turn the A/C up, etc). When prices spike the utility already sends me phone/email notifications to reduce consumption.