Twelve Years of Electricity Consumption Data

Twelve years ago I had an idea: if I could figure out a way to read my electricity meter in real time, and post my usage in public, and then convince some friends to do the same, perhaps the social pressure with being public with something that’s usually not would reduce our collective usage.This idea became The Social Consumption Project, and I received a microgrant from the City of Charlottetown to help fund it.I identified a simple, inexpensive, USB device, the Grid Insight AMRUSB-1, that could read both electricity and water meters in Charlottetown (which sent out their readings, unencrypted, to allow meter readers to read them on regular drive-bys), and I came up with a Raspberry Pi-based solution for reading meters and uploading readings to a web-based database,Over the life of the project there were 8 households that allowed me to read and publish their consumption data. While the meter-reading part of the solution was rock-solid, the “hooking a Raspberry Pi up to home wifi”…