Monitor Household AC Power usage using Clamp Meters

 

This Household AC Power Monitor idea is similar to what I have wanted to do for years. Jason Winters has taken two clamp meters and connected them to both phases of his house electrical panel. This allows him to monitor the entire electrical usage of his house. He is collecting data and creating a spreadsheet to monitor usage over time. What I was thinking of doing was to install one coil per breaker circuit and have a display that simply cycles through the individual circuits, show a sum of the circuit usage and also a RGB LED to indicate amount of usage at a glance.

"The electrical current is measured on the main lines entering my home with AC clamps. The signal is then conditioned with a simple circuit and monitored by an ioBridge module. The ioBridge module takes care of feeding the data to the internet without the need for me to host a power hungry home web server. By using ioBridge widgets with a few JavaScript API calls on my web page, I am able to chart the data with Google Charts as it is measured and make kilowatt-hour calculations in real-time."

Thanks for the tip Jim.


7 Comments



  1. “connected them to both phases”

    Clarification. House wiring is single phase, from a center tap neutral 220V transformer.


  2. i’m gussing that spike at 11:00 to 3:00 was a test? Seems like that’s when you would be at work and kids at school… Unless the wifey has a secret laboratory or something… Oo


  3. I could see this being very useful, especially if you were trying to create your own energy and run off the grid.


  4. Smart ideea, how much do those clamp meters cost??


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