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Posted by Neon John on March 1, 2007, 12:04 am
Please log in for more thread options wrote:
>Per LM:
>>Anyway, I visited his site quite a while ago and noticed he built a
>>gadget to sense the light pulses from the meter. If you are handy with
>>electronics this is one way to do it...
>>http://www.bwired.nl/How.asp Click on el. meter link.
>
>This touches on something that I've obsessed about in the past.
>
>Seems to me like every electric meter should be putting out a WiFi, Bluetooth,
>or some other signal continuously.
Contact closure and RF output (NOT wifi or bluetooth) is available if
you're willing to pay for it. A typical utility meter costs <$50 in
bulk so not much comes with it.
>
>That would enable the creation of a wireless "home speedometer" that could be
>put anywhere in the house like a wireless thermometer.
>
>My thought is that once people can easily and quickly see how much electric
>they're using, they'll become much more conscious of waste...
Nah, already tried. During the first oil embargo I worked with an
inventor to implement his invention. His idea was a unit that clamped
onto a power meter, counted the dial revolutions by optically sensing
the zero flag on the meter dial and converted that to useful stats
such as instantaneous power usage, usage to date on this billing
cycle, etc.
I designed him the hardware and he tried to market it. Big flop. No
market for it. People don't really care.
This was a time when the Z80 was the state-of-the-art processor so the
gadget could be made much cheaper than back then but I still think
that there would be little interest.
>
>It's certainly had that effect on me since fooling around with the Kill-A-Watt
>product just on my computer work station
>
>I'm *still* wondering what the "idle speed" of my house is....
That's easy enough. Get out your stop watch and go to your meter.
Count the dial revolutions over a period of time. Multiply those
revolutions by the Kh factor printed on the dial face (the number of
watt-hours per dial revolution) and divide by the time in hours to get
average KW. or just total the revolutions and multiply by Kh to get
the KWh over the time interval.
John
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John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.neon-john.com
Cleveland, Occupied TN
Don't let your schooling interfere with your education-Mark Twain
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