I have been in contact with Mark on my energy@home project and found Mark’s website which led me to a disappointing discovery – bug in the CurrentCost device.

Whilst it has not affected me yet it is somewhat disconcerning that the bug has existed over 2 generation of a product and still remains unfixed by the manufacturer.

The bug happens when multiple sensors are connected and the watts go over 3kW on either 2nd or 3rd channel. Whilst I am only using one sensor currently I was hoping the IAM sensors due to be released by CurrentCost won’t be affected. The pessimist I am I somehow doubt it if I hooked it up to a 3kW+ appliance e.g kettle.

Fridge/Freezer Anomaly Explained (Probably)

I have just published version 0.4 of energy@home. It includes Twitter integration and a new graph which shows how much energy was used for each hour of the day.

energy@home project page

A preview of my part time project energy@home with Twitter integration.

As you can see the value for total energy used is currently way off but it’s a preview of what’s to come.

There are two options: tweet hourly summary and daily summary. These can be turned on and off. I am using python-twitter library which does not use oauth authentication so the client description comes up as API which is not nice.

I have formally uploaded and started using Google Code to host my energy monitor I’m using / developing.

It has been released under the GPL license so feel free to take a look at my messy code and leave some constructive criticism.

http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/