Following my mission to get smart meters installed I started to look into the possibility of using Zigbee to gather my energy usage statistics from my new state of the art meters. This, as it seems, would not be as easy as I at first thought. Tantalisingly, on the back of the ecoMeter In Home […]
After quite a bit of pestering and waiting I eventually managed to persuade British Gas to swap out my archaic Electricity and Gas meters for the latest ‘Phase 3’ Smart Meters. This certainly was not an easy process and, despite constant bombardment of TV adverts on television from British Gas about how smart meters are […]
Armed with the knowledge about how meters have a ‘pulse’, I was then able to start building a sensor and simple Arduino sketch (C++ code) to calculate my electricity consumption. Power v’s Energy Before I started, I needed to understand some basic terminology about electricity! I did not fully appreciate the difference between Power and […]
For the past year and a half I have habitually been recording my Gas and Electricity meter readings (my wife would probably say it was an obsession!). Each week I would clamber under the stairs armed with my iPhone flashlight, crawling through the dust I would read the digits from my old ‘dumb’ meters. I […]