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Build Your Own Open Source Twittering Power Meter
ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company 'Adafruit Industries' has released a 'Tweet-a-watt' kit. It's an open source power monitoring kit that mods an off-the-shelf power meter which can 'tweet' (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed & Cumulative Kilowatt-hours to your Twitter account, Google App Engine, Facebook, IRC, whatever ... They recently won the 'GreenerGadget' design competition and have now released an open source hardware kit."
Since when?
tweet = buzzword(new); seems more like it.
You can't take the sky from me...
Unless you're living in the 80's, most households have a basic computer which is all it takes to email, tweet and connect to the internet. The only thing taking up additional power is the hardware to monitor it.
Another point is in order to read the power meter you generally need to wander outside in some hidden corner of your house, or down into a hidden location in the basement. It's really hard to keep that routine up. Adding the hardware may take just a touch more power, but at least that data is in a place that can be readily checked and the person can be much more aware of power usage.
Personally I think it's a rather brilliant idea.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I don't know about you, but my computer is nowhere near my power meter. Not to mention the handy monthly usage monitoring that comes courtesy of the the power company. Its cool in a geek sense that making anything is cool, but its rather useless overall, and if you really cared enough about being green for more than the appearance, you'd find the time to check the actual meter rather than wasting your power (oh, and you'd be turning off your computer when not in use, which would save far more power than monitoring ever will). If you really want to do monitoring, what you want to do is monitor individual appliances so you can find the inefficient ones and replace them or unplug when not in use. Typically this is older fridges and the TV.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm using The Energy Detective (http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html) and a custom version of this python script (http://svn.navi.cx/misc/trunk/python/ted.py) to measure, track, and graph whole house power consumption.