Whole house energy monitor

Well, I am a bit particular, I wanted one that logs to a computer and does not upload to the cloud and does every circuit. I really wanted a Brultech Greeneye, its been on my wishlist for 5 years now. But I just could not justify the 400$ they want. It seems to be the best one out there. It monitors each circuit of your house plus the entire house and logs it to your computer for minute by minute detail.

But instead I purchased an Efergy Elite Wireless Electricity monitor for 110$. It monitors only the whole house electrical usage and logs it to the wireless monitor it comes with that keeps instantaneous, daily use, weekly use, and monthly use. There supposedly is a hack to grab that information out of the air with a 10$ USB video tuner and an antenna and log it to CSV every minute, but I have not gotten around to trying it. Overall, I would say it is the most cost effective unit of the bunch, it does the energy saving stuff I needed but does not have the data p0rn that I wanted. I have the monitor setup in my living room so I can glance at it and see an instantaneous whole house power usage. Its interesting to see how much money it costs to use the electric clothes dryer and the bread maker and oven. Puts it into perspective how much those home made cookies and bread actually cost to make. Its also opened my wife's eyes on how much money using the clothes line actually saves and has pushed her to do the clothes line more often in the summer. Its also made me cut back on the furnace's auto fan run every few hours after seeing how much electricity that blows through.

http://goughlui.com/2013/11/14/efergy-e ... h-rtl-sdr/

I stumbled on something that does this but I haven't purchased it yet so can't really comment on how good it is. It does require a Z-wave hub to get the data through it seems.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

Amazon has some reviews of it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DIB ... 7D5UJY7IVU

If you're a bit industrious you should be able to build an Arduino based current sensor setup for a reasonable amount of money. Current clamp sensors appear to cost about $6/each off eBay.

We went to smart meters a few years back so now I can track whole house energy usage by the hour within my online account. It works pretty well actually for checking on usage as a whole in conjunction with the Kill-A-Watt for individual devices. Maybe check with your provider to see if that might be on the way.

[url=http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=30377985#p30377985:32buimad said:

xsvtoys[/url]":32buimad]We went to smart meters a few years back so now I can track whole house energy usage by the hour within my online account. It works pretty well actually for checking on usage as a whole in conjunction with the Kill-A-Watt for individual devices. Maybe check with your provider to see if that might be on the way.

Click to expand...

This. I can get hourly electricity and gas usage online. Resolution isn't great (~1kW), but we can tell when major appliances (washer/drier, etc) are running.

Using a current meter on the inlet of the power box connected to one of these. You can add in a little flash chip for a dollar or two or an SD card for logging.
This Is a ready made version if you want to skip most of the work.