The Day That Was

Soundclip, a tiny plastic scoop to direct iPhone sound ($8) ⌁ An investor buys Republic Windows factory to build new efficient windowpanes ⌁ Acer's 10-inch netbook, shades of the Xbox 360 ⌁ AMD cut 1,100 staffers ⌁ "SkyBox", "SkyMarket" are Microsoft's rumored MobileMe, App Store equivalent for Windows Mobile ⌁ Hanging out with Alan Kay, god ⌁ Would Apple make a 15-inch MacBook Air? ⌁ Obama keeps his BlackBerry, but must use a monster for official business ⌁ Belkin employee was buying good reviews via Mechanical Turk ⌁ The next Puzzle Quest teased, playable online ⌁ For the first time, the Toyota Prius has a cash incentive ⌁ Ugly "Bone" is a better garage creeper ($200ish) ⌁ Crecente turns even parenting into pageviews with a LEGO Sonic ⌁ Kill-A-Watt + Twitter == Tweet-a-watt ⌁ There are those into retro batteries ⌁ Another Vaio P review, this time from Akihabara News ⌁ Speaker found in carton of milk ⌁ CrunchGear looking for an iPhone writer ⌁ Belkin paid for positive reviews.

[#1 posted by zuzu , January 19, 2009 4:54 PM]

That Tweet-A-Watt is a cool concept, but I'd sooner splurge on a Veris / TrendPoint Power Monitoring System as mentioned years ago on Slashdot.

Have you ever wondered how much power that microwave takes to pop that bag of popcorn? What about your toaster or coffee maker? How much power does that 'energy efficient' refrigerator actually use? And does it really make a difference if you turn all those lights off all the time? The problem with wondering about this stuff is there isn't really much you can do to measure it. Sure you can use a meter to measure an individual device here and there, but what does your whole house look like?

About a year ago I was hired to develop a web based power monitoring application for data centers. The application was designed to monitor thousands of individual branch circuits using current transducers at the breaker panels. Among other things, the data logging requirments were to provide one year of min/max/mean measurement data with one minute resolution per circuit. Since I had all the hardware for testing, I figured what better way to test things than to install it in my own home.

I'm a software guy by trade, but have done my fair share of home improvement projects and other construction hacks. I figured wiring current transducers to my breaker panel would be a quick little project that would yield all kinds of really interesting data about my house... in effect providing me with a 'sniffer' for my electrical network.

[#2 posted by zuzu , January 19, 2009 9:09 PM]

Here's a more "chicken wire and bubble gum" approach.