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Current Cost Energy Meter

4 July 2009

http://www.pachube.com/feeds/2210 [not quite working yet]

11 June 2009

Back in March I bought an "E-On" branded Current Cost Energy Meter on EBay for £32.00 GBP including surface mail (NZD$82). Yesterday it arrived. [You can buy them in New Zealand for $150, $200 or $239 - which would be much quicker delivery.]

The main benefit of the Current Cost meter is I can monitor my whole household power usage. And I'll be able to produce graphs of usage over time. That will allow me to really understand my power demand, and therefore modify my behavior in ways that actually reduce my energy usage.

My intention is to connect up to the laptop that gather my weather station data and us it to create nice graphs like Google or Pachube.

I plugged it in today - very simple setup. The transmitter has 2 D sized batteries and lives inside the metal meter box on the outside of the house. I'm impressed that the transmitter works through the steel box.

Currently my based load (things that run all the time is somewhere around 176 Watts.

My "base load" appliances are:

• oven (clock)
• fridge freezer (more that 5 years old)
• microwave (timer)
• internet cable modem
• internet gateway/router/firewall
• network hub
• wifi hotspot
• burglar alarm
• bed side alarm clock [I plan to replace this with a solar powered radio]
• CD player in lounge, standby mode
• Solar water heater controller
• web server (and 2nd firewall) in garage
• Kill-a-watt appliance energy monitor
• Current Cost display unit

There's plenty of potential to reduce this list.

Next step - make a data cable:

• http://e.inste.in/2008/06/15/interfacing-the-currentcost-meter-to-your-pc/

Resources:

• http://currentcost.wetpaint.com/
• http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/?tag=currentcost
• http://mungbean.org/blog/?p=477

Software:

• http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/100
• http://www.techtoniq.com/products/CurrentCostAgent/

Feb 2009

Spurred on by this bit of Google fluff I've bought (via EBay) a Current Cost Energy Meter (Classic) that can interface with a computer to generate nice online charts.

Current Cost Energy Meters

Sources:

• (UK) E-bay store

  # Classic £45.00
  # Envi - CC128 £49.50

• http://www.delphinus.co.nz/current-cost-power-monitor/ (NZ) Wirlesss with data port. Little bit of an open source community springing up. This looks like the way to go. It's probably the hardware that Google is playing with at the moment. Not sold in New
  1. Classic $200.00
• http://www.naturalsystems.co.nz/store/store.html
  1. Classic $159.99
• more geek info

I also looked at buying a Centameter - which is wireless - but has no data port. I could have built my own wireless receiver for it and work from that - but that seems like more effort than I can be bothered with.

• Cent-a-meter (AU/NZ) NZD$189
• Owl CM119 (UK) - £27.70 (that's NZD $76), £28 ,£30

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