Tracking the energy use of household appliances
Guzzler Check

Want to bring down your electric bill? Investigate your favorite household appliances with a consumption meter and a Raspberry Pi.
Understanding energy consumption is more important now than ever, and the tools of the smart home provide some interesting possibilities for energy monitoring. This article shows how to use an energy consumption meter to answer practical questions about the power usage of home appliances.
A consumption meter is a device that sits between the appliance and the socket outlet. Some versions include a graphic display to show the current power consumption and the total consumption. Other models support some form of networking to transmit data to a hub or computer system for viewing and further processing. I'll look at two consumption meters that transmit wireless data output. The Voltcraft SEM6000 uses the low-energy Bluetooth variant known as Bluetooth LE to transmit the data, and the Delock 11827 supports WiFi (Figure 1). A Raspberry Pi acts as the data logger, recording the measured values over several days. Simple Python scripts handle the task of evaluating the profiles. This article was written for the 230-volt European electrical environment, but alternative consumption meters are available for the 120-volt North American market, and, with a little ingenuity, you can adapt these techniques to address other energy consumption questions in other settings.

[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.