anybody using a power measurement unit they can recommend?
this kinda thing

You can buy a fair amount of electricity for £60, can’t you get a free one? My mother did then gifted it to me.

Why do you need to spend £60 on something when you can just look at your leccy meter? Or am I missing something?

Why do you need to spend £60 on something when you can just look at your leccy meter? Or am I missing something?

🙂

For number-nerds reading the meter doesn’t give enough detail – unless you’re prepared to sit in front of it all day.

Yes, common-sense will tell you what devices are using the electricity but some of us like graphs! (I guess the nay-sayers also don’t need GPS trackers or HR monitors)

I saw an Efergy unit partially rebranded by a local supplier of electrical consumables. The additional clips for 3-phase are not available locally though, so I went digging and found OpenEnergyMonitor – more of a tinkerer’s device though.

Have now spent ~4x what the Efergy costs on Raspberry Pi and emon stuff but will be able to monitor 3-phases, individual air-cons and the water heater (solar with electric element for when the sun don’t shine).

Seems like many UK energy companies give out Efergy and similar devices (e.g. Owl) for free.

See if your electricity supplier will install a free smart meter,we recently had our gas and electricity meters replaced by edf for smart meters with a moniter for nowt.

I’ve used an owl and it works well but I’m not sure it’s worth the money in the end. Be aware if you have 3ph 240 phase to phase then none of the standard ‘cheap’ ones will work :(. Don’t know how common that is though as most folks are single phase anyway

Freebie from british gas.

Does the job

And if the aim is to reduce your bills then the meters for individual appliances are arguably more useful. I went around all my appliances to see what they consumed, stuff like cheap Chinese Ethernet switches take way more than they should and add up. I changed from everything on standby all the time to only those items that would be a pain to turn on and off and halved our consumption.

I just flicked all mcbs off

Put them on 1 at a time to identify circuits using heaps.

Biggest drain unsurprisingly being the 2 x 400 watt security lights.

House now costs 1 pence an hour in standing leccy. Thats the fridge and clocks and pia standbys

A colleague at work writes loads of SW/APIs for the OWL energy monitors, so you can talk to it over USB and log data.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/electricowl/

Why do you need to spend £60 on something when you can just look at your leccy meter? Or am I missing something?

Because I is thick 🙄

Thanks for the constructive replies 😆

Having googled a bit the simple(like me)plug in device should do the trick 💡

I got a british gas one which is nice (adds up the weeks/months use etc and estimates cost). I power it up every so often to see what’s going on but ultimately I use what I use and I don’t leave stuff on that I don’t think is unreasonable to leave on so it only really tells me what I’m prepared to accept as a base load.

The engineer in me wants to hack the radio signal from it and log it constantly but ultimately that would just be a project for the fun of it, it won’t tell me any info I’m going to use for any purpose.

Contrary to popular believe, modern phone chargers take sweet FA when powered on but not connected. Any modern TV and accessory will take less than a watt in standby (all of mine together don’t register on my meter!) and most modern hard drive recorders and set top boxes take about 20W when bumbling along. My boiler is my biggest user, at 60W mean for no apparent reason (just sat there waiting to turn on).

After that my computer is the biggest gobbler, the PSU even when turned off seems to consume about 20W!? The two wifi routers and NAS plus all the rest sees us sat around 200W with spikes of 400 when the fridge/freezer kicks in. I’m not willing to turn off my routers when not home and I need the fridge and boiler on, I turn the PC off at the wall. That’s life.