About

Some time ago, I had installed some solar panels on the house. I also made some other changes to the house - moved some 'always on' servers to virtual machines running on a more power efficient Apple Mac Mini, changed many of the more frequently used 50W halogen lights to LED.... Overall, probably reduced the power footprint of our house by more than 30%.

But, the active word here is 'probably'. I really had no idea how much of an impact my changes really had made. I did have a 'wattson' which was pretty cool - changed colour depending on amount of power being used, was able to log power usage based on clamps on the main feeds..... but it wasn't very accurate and in any case died some months ago. My power meter was upgraded to a 'smart' meter (in fact it had been replaced a few years ago with a smart meter when the solar was installed - but it was 'incompatible with the grid' so had to be replaced again!), and I thought a zigbee device would be great. Provide accurate info on power usage, and potentially be able to provide historical data.

Had a search, and found rainforest automation (http://rainforestautomation.com/) had a USB dongle that was compatible with my meter. It also had an open API that meant that it should be possible to do a number of things with it.... very promising. Also found that some people had been able to grab data from it and upload it. Sold.