Monitoring System for Home Power

Figure 1 

The project aims to monitor the power consumption for an entire house by utilizing current transducers, an Arduino, and some custom software wherein the power measurements are graphed and made public on a web server.
The device may be considered as a slightly cheaper hack of The Energy Detective where both current power consumption and summary charts represent the data shared online. It can visualize when appliances, lights, computers, and other devices are using home power. Other components included in the design are Arduino Ethernet Shield, small sheet plexiglass with mounting screws and standoffs, and router capable of running openwrt or something that can serve a cgi script.

To eliminate the need for the expensive Ethernet shield, a serial port can be added to a router running openwrt or using a dedicated computer connected to the Arduino serial. The need for the openwrt router as well as the Ethernet shield can be eliminated by hosting the charts locally or on a server with a dedicated static IP address. A cheap netbook can be used for viewing the data locally on a machine that is always ON at home since web hosting is optional.

Rest of the project