Re: Measuring my electricity consumption.....

[James Fidell <james@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting darren_karp2001 (darren@xxxxxxx):

> I've been on to http://pietje.com/stroom.asp and
would love the idea
> of monitoring my usage. My lecky meter doesn't have a flashing LED.
> Is there any gizmo (X10 or similar) that I could use?

I've been thinking about this, too.

The newest digital meters I've seen (we had one installed in a house we
renovated a couple of years back, and there was one in a new house we
rented whilst we were house-hunting) have had a little flashing LED.
They also had a breaker built in, which makes for nice easy isolation of
the consumer unit if you need to play with it. I don't know if there's
any way to persuade the electricity board to swap the meter though.

Here we have an old "whizzy wheel" (at least, ours whizzes :)
meter.
I've been wondering if it might not still be possible to use a similar
method to count the number of times the black marker on the edge of the
wheel passes.  AFAIR, 166 and 2/3 rotations of this wheel is 1KWh.

The other alternative that seems much more work is to put a webcam in
front of the meter and take pictures of the read-out reguarly, running
the results through an OCR system to get the digits.

The obvious problem with both of these is that they need light to work.

Hunting around on the web very briefly leads me to these:

http://tinyurl.com/5fvpy
http://www.emetco.co.uk/Shop-2.asp

which look promising.  Could they be wired in series with the existing
meter, I wonder?

James