• IMALlama@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Look up “home energy monitor”. They install inside your panel. The one we have has a bunch of current clamps, but not enough for our huge panel, so I chose what I thought our more heavily used circuits were. It also measures line voltage. Voltage x current = bingo. I’m not completely sure how I feel about the one I bought, so I’m not going to call it out. I wish it flagged trends per circuit over time to catch things like failing appliances. I could root it and mod it, but it would be nice if it did it out of the box. Catching a failing appliance would more than pay for the device, even if you do it by hand by simply tracking the data. It has slightly changed our habits (see: the furnace blower that we left on all the time and was pulling a constant 500 watts aka 12 kwh/day aka 360 kwh/mo), but I wouldn’t expect to find anything crazy unless you have high usage.

    • fubarx@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      Thanks! Looks like lots of options out there.

      Our power panel is old and we’ve been advised it may need replacing. I briefly looked at Span panels, with built-in energy monitoring, but they’re not cheap. These monitors look like you at least get the data at a much more reasonable price.