Sunday, February 5, 2012

Home Circuit Power Monitoring - Part 2

It has been about 6 months from when I installed per circuit power monitoring in my home (http://www.mikepoulson.com/2011/07/new-home-power-monitor.html).

In January 2012 I started injecting all my power data into a SQL DB (SQL Express).  This has allowed me to use Tableau (www.tableausoftware.com) to analyze the utilization.

Here is an example of that power consumption in my House. 


You can see my office plugs (where my Media Center is located) is my #1 consumer of power.  You can see that the TV and Kitchen outlets are in second place.

I used the data shown here to determine that my 1st floor lights use a lot of power.   This weekend I replaced those 400 Watts of lights with new LEDs (Phillips Ambient LED, http://www.amazon.com/Philips-409904-Dimmable-AmbientLED-12-5-Watt/dp/B004IUMGV4).

You can see from the graph below how much power I used to watch the "BIG GAME".

Based off this and a power cost of $.09/Kwh it cost ~$.24 to watch the game.
(539 watts /1000 = .539Kw * 5 hours = 2.70KwH * .09 = $.245)

This does not include the cost of beer, snacks, the cookies, steaks or stress. 

To get this to work I use tenEcmServer and tenEcmDB from http://tenholder.net/tenWare2/tenEcmServer/default.aspx.  The tenEcmDB needed a little modification to work with SQL Server.  By default it works with SQLLight.  With the tenEcm components I can monitor my BrulTech equipment and provided extensive reporting on it.

10 Years from last post

 Well world!   After the last almost 10 years I have been up to a few things in life and work.  Most recently I was working at Microsoft on ...