Badgerpower
Not long ago I bought a Current Cost smart electricity meter from Southern Electric’s eco gadget shop. It works by induction, clipping around the mains cable by your real meter and then wirelessly transmitting the reading every few seconds to an LCD display.
When I first plugged it in I got the urge to turn things on and off to watch how much electricity they were using. The house in ‘standby’ mode was about 300 watts, which was a bit more than I expected. Halogen kitchen lights add another 200 watts, which is pretty poor efficiency if you ask me. Then I put the kettle on. Great Scott! 1.6 jigawatts. Well, okay 1.6 kilowatts really. That’s a shedload.
I spent the rest of the week going around turning off everything at the wall unless it was
- too hard to reach
- too hard to re-program
- the electric meter
Then I ordered the USB cable. I plugged it in and mucked about with some perl USB input scripts I found until I made one work (Paul Mutton’s Current Cost USB script seemed to be ideal) and glued it together with rrdtool.
You can visit live stats as they happen at: Live Badgerpower!
