Today has been interesting in that I woke up and went straight to my Mac Pro, that is usually running through the night along with all my other computers, and checked Twitter. I noticed Bill Thompson mention Dr Who, don't know why that caught my eye, I'm not a big fan or anything like that but all the same, there was a link that took me to a recording or a radio interview with Andy Stamford-Clark and engineer at IBM who has wired his Isle of Wight house up to send Tweets when certain things happen.
Then after delving further I found more information about what Andy does and that his setup also monitors and tweets the electricity power consumption of the house as well as individual appliances. It was only the other day when we were faced with paying what equated to be a large electricity bill, almost double what I usually pay and I was wondering what could be drawing so much energy.
The web pages led me to find that what Andy was actually using, was a device that uses a sensor around the main power cable going into the house, that detects the flow of electrical current in the wire and that in turn is displayed wirelessly to a device with an LCD screen. The device also has a serial port allowing it to be connected to a computer. More details here.
For more detail go and take a look at his video presentation and read the interview found here. I have now ordered the monitoring hardware via eBay and I shall blog about it's installation and setup when it arrives.
I have also ordered a Viglen MPC-L for just £104.75 with £11 postage, which will run the setup described by Andy.
IBM is offering the MQTT service for free to those interested in participating in the social side of this project. I can see this becoming an ongoing project for my house in Switzerland. Stay tuned.
Not only does this look like a fun and reasonably cheap project but it can also potentially save you money spent on your energy bills. How cool is that?
