Build Your Own Open Source Twittering Power Meter 31
ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company 'Adafruit Industries' has released a 'Tweet-a-watt' kit. It's an open source power monitoring kit that mods an off-the-shelf power meter which can 'tweet' (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed & Cumulative Kilowatt-hours to your Twitter account, Google App Engine, Facebook, IRC, whatever ... They recently won the 'GreenerGadget' design competition and have now released an open source hardware kit."
Re:Isn't that missing the point? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about you, but my computer is nowhere near my power meter. Not to mention the handy monthly usage monitoring that comes courtesy of the the power company. Its cool in a geek sense that making anything is cool, but its rather useless overall, and if you really cared enough about being green for more than the appearance, you'd find the time to check the actual meter rather than wasting your power (oh, and you'd be turning off your computer when not in use, which would save far more power than monitoring ever will). If you really want to do monitoring, what you want to do is monitor individual appliances so you can find the inefficient ones and replace them or unplug when not in use. Typically this is older fridges and the TV.
Re:Aggregate power consumption would be nice... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm using The Energy Detective (http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html) and a custom version of this python script (http://svn.navi.cx/misc/trunk/python/ted.py) to measure, track, and graph whole house power consumption.