[Willem] has been using an Arduino to monitor temperatures and electricity usage. For the temperature monitoring he picked up some 1-wire temperature sensors similar to those we’ve featured in the past. To pick up on electricity usage he’s not using an amp sensors, but because he’s in the UK he does have a flashing LED on his power meter. There’s a known trick to pick up these flashes with a photo cell to calculate energy usage based on meter readings. Finally, the data from the three sensors (indoor temp, outdoor temp, and energy usage) is piped over the Internet via an Ethernet shield so that it can be collected and graphed.
[Willem] has had the system running for a year. If you’re nosy you can look at the temperature graph generated from his collected data.
So this time, instead of using an arduino to make an LED flash, the arduino is detecting the flashes? Interesting….
Yeah, I’ll probably do it myself if my meters turns out to be one of those “flashing” ones (I think there are some which only use the led’s for IR communication with handhelds devices).
But I’ll probably need to add more storage to the ‘duino, as I want it to be decoupled from the computer and only “dump” the data on a daily basis or so.
this is used for growing cannabis, correct?
Anyone know how to monitor the spinny disc in the US power meters? I’ve always wanted to do something like this with my house, but unfortunately we don’t have the nice flashing LED to monitor…
Check out this company, they are doing the same thing but marketing it to large building owners:
http://www.pulseenergy.com