recently become somewhat obsessed with understanding how much electricity our home is using, It can be used in conjunction with other solutions such as adafruits Tweet A Watt to provide a very detailed picture of consumption within your home and gets you one step closer to having a home smart grid
In all seriousness, looking for a project that will hook together a number of different interests as well as to being sufficiently large that have to break the problem down into a number of discrete partsA lot of the solutions look at monitoring by measuring in series with an appliance (or extension cord) from a plug as oppossed to the whole house. think the ideal solution is a combination of both but the majority of documented projects concentrate on the plug side of things
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So this instructable documents the process of creating a device that monitors the number of flashes being produced by a UK Electric meter and sending the count to a computer for data logging and visualisation
The system consists of two parts, a unit that sits in the meter cupboard (based around a photdiode, an Arduino, a DS1307 Real Time Clock and an XBee wireless board) and a computer based reader (an XBee via a USB explorer board and a Mac OS X logging application).
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