Wattcher: The Twittering Kill-a-Watt Energy Monitor

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by Tim Fulton on February 5, 2009

It used to be that human beings were the only ones hopping on the Twitter bandwagon, but it seems like this is no longer the case. Recently, however, an innovative individual has been able to turn a few Kill-a-Watts into a whole home energy monitoring system.

As you may know, the Kill-a-Watt is normally just a gadget for one outlet, but in this project entire rooms have been plugged into power strips, meaning that each room in the house will be Twittering its own energy supply. While there are other whole home energy monitors out there, the online access and room by room breakdown make this a pretty interesting solution.

The Wattcher is a simple concept, but an innovative one: take the very handy Kill-a-Watt and some wireless transmitters to send all the data to twitter, where a computer program can aggregate the data. If you’d like more detail in order to build your own, follow this link for some step by step instructions.

However, there is one caveat I can think of: not all of the energy you use in your home comes out of the plugs, so there were likely be a good bit of discrepency between the Wattcher monthly recordings and the actual power bill, depending on whether things lights on switches, electric appliances, etc are commonly used.

I’m not sure if I have the gusto to go out and build one now, but if anyone else, be sure to leave a comment with your impressions of the process and the final product.

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