CurrentCost is a UK-built device which you ‘clamp’ around the mains cable coming into your home. It monitors the energy flow accurately and has a remote display panel. The bonus with the display panel is that it has a data port which, with an optional USB cable allows for the data to be used by a PC.
Since there’s a spare USB socket on Vera, I’m going to try and get it reading the data from it when I get one. There’s already Linux scripts to do it, so it should be easy.
Is there any plan (no matter how distant) to integrate this kind of energy monitoring? Until the ZWave modules report the energy use themselves I see little benefit from filling in the energy fields of each device manually, but with a little work, over time Vera could correlate the accurate data from CurrentCost, along with which devices are switched on/off, and build a picture of ‘cause & effect’ energy usage.
After reading that thread I can see why they would resist adding TED to the solution. However, the CurrentCost method is amazingly simple and there are already Linux scripts to read the data, so there shouldn’t be any obstacle to getting it working.
I’m going to give it a go as soon as they open their Subversion server up anyway, so I’ll see what I can do.
We definately need currrent sensor support. It would be nice to be able to clamp a leg on my oven. Then if I set my house to “Away” mode, and I’ve left the oven on it would text message my cellphone. UPS detection would also be another great feature.
dsample, Looking forward to your findings on this UK product. Its one area that is very important to me and integration with Vera with any device would be a huge bonus, so waiting in anticipation.