Monitor your energy consumption with Go
Programming Snapshot – Go Energy Monitor
© Lead Image © Lightwise, 123RF.com
Before adding a new gadget to the household, Mike Schilli always monitors its power consumption with a Go program and creates intuitive graphs to decide whether it can stay.
Electricity is expensive. Where I live, in California, a kilowatt hour costs around 40 cents. If a new gadget consumes 20W in continuous operation, that adds up to 14kWh per month or almost $6. In addition, the price of electricity from my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, is based on the time of day (Figure 1). A time-based power consumption breakdown for selected devices could offer ideas for potential savings.
Figure 1: Energy usage graph from Pacific Gas & Electric.
An energy monitor such as the TP-Link Tapo P110M (Figure 2) keeps you up to date with the amount of power you are currently using; it has an API to make the measurement results available to inquiring WiFi clients. Upon request, the small device reports the power currently being drawn in milliwatts by all consumers plugged into it. On top of that, it also features two persistent counters that measure cumulated watt hours, one for the current day and one for the month.
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