
Ask HN: Do you use a whole house electricity monitor? - dundercoder
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?
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joezydeco
My 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.

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saluki
I don't yet but I might set this up this summer.

[https://blog.kroy.io/monitoring-home-power-consumption-
for-l...](https://blog.kroy.io/monitoring-home-power-consumption-for-less-
than-25/)

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jagger27
Can you give an example of what you mean? I assume you mean something other
than the outdoor metering device used by the power company.

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dundercoder
Sure. 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/)

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acct1771
Besides load/usage double-check, what benefits, if any, does this provide?

