« New Toy: Saving energy with Current Cost | Home | Meeting the Slug »
Setting up my Current Cost Meter
By chris dalby | June 15, 2008
My long awaited current cost meter arrived this week . I have been looking forward to this arriving for the last month, especially after reading the blogs written by Dale Lane, Andy Piper, Roo Reynolds.
Background
I first found out about the Current Cost craze after reading a tweet from Matt Bidulph. His tweet linked to a graph showing his energy consumption. A quick google search, revealed alot of writing about the Current Cost craze that has hit IBM’s Hursley crowd. So I decided to ask on twitter how I could get a Current Cost meter and join the graph.
The magic of twitter gave me a reply by Andy Stanford-Clark, Master Inventor at IBM and specialist in automation and remote monitoring - hence the Current Cost. Andy has been hugely helpful with getting me up and running. He has also given me a huge interest in automation and remote monitoring. Especially after seeing how he has put his whole house online with the andy_house twitter stream and after listening to the podcast where Andy talks about how he automated the mousetraps in his home.
The Current Cost Meter
If you live in the UK, you can order a current cost from from ecogadgetshop.co.uk - beware they have a 28 day delivery time. The meter comes in two parts:
1. Transmitter that hooks over the electricity cable running between your meter and Circuit Box. This requires no wiring to connect and has easy to follow instructions for installing
2. The Current Cost meter is a small display that receives a wireless signal from the transmitter and outputs the energy consumption data, showing current energy usage and cost, historical usage and cost and temperature. This can be located anywhere you wish within the house. My meter is two floors above the transmitter and has a full strength signal.
The meter also has an RJ-45 socket on the bottom, allowing you to attach to a computer via a serial cable and grab xml data that is spat out the meter every 6 seconds.
Graphing the Results
At the moment, my Current Cost is sending data to a Broker at IBM, giving me an online graph in the form of a java applet. This works by using a perl script that monitors the serial connection to the current cost and uses MQTT to send the xml data to a broker at IBM.
This is great, but any geek worth their salt likes to have a play and see what else can be done :
What’s next?
All this has raised my interest in home automation and monitoring. So I have registered chris_house on twitter, in the dream that I will soon be outputting data and eventually be controlling the house via commands entered into twitter. I have also purchased a SLUG, which with a firmware flash becomes a linux server, and will be my home automation hub running a nano version of mqtt - all at the low power of 4 watts.
So in the first instance, I’ll start databasing all the current cost data and outputting the results using the Google Chart API so I can have a web dashboard of all this data available to mobile or desktop devices. Controlling the house using an iPod Touch, cool. I will then look to monitor my SIP phone system as it can’t be too hard to monitor a device on the same network, right? Who knows how far I will take this 
It certainly is a great bit of fun at the moment. Seeing people getting their doorbell online also makes me want to go and buy a doorbell for a weekend project. Stay tuned for more blog posts in the future as things progress.
Topics: Tech Watch |