Ask HN: Do you use a whole house electricity monitor?
There are plenty of commercial and open source electrical main-feed monitoring solutions out there. Do you use one? What do you like about it?
For $45 I bought a USB/Zigbee dongle that spits out XML-formatted information from the meter. With no change to my wiring I can monitor whole-house usage with about 4 watt-hours of resolution.
But I don't really do much with it. I thought about putting together a little LCD panel that shows consumption vs grid price (I opted to pay real-time prices). But I still don't know what benefit it would have unless I really wire the whole house to use that data (e.g. turn off lights, turn the A/C up, etc). When prices spike the utility already sends me phone/email notifications to reduce consumption.
https://blog.kroy.io/monitoring-home-power-consumption-for-l...