Home electricity consumption dashboard

That's not true. In countries like South Africa we are constantly asked by our Electricity provider, Eskom, to please decrease our power usage. This would be an ingenious way to make electricity owners aware of what appliances are using the most and therefore modify their usage to save electricity.

That might be it. Do you have any example where it is implemented in real life? The cost of the system and simplicity of installation is crucial.

http://www.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=511951

Let's think about it a bit first. If you don't have an ultra high measurement precision expectations (let's say 3 - 5% measuring error rate is OK), you can use eg ARDUINO or PICAXE (central unit / CU in general) connected to as many measuring units (MU) as needed.

But you have to think about the wires from each MU to CU. Then you can have a display connected to it or stream the data to your iPhone / iPad. No problem at all.

The total cost can be defined as the cost of the central unit (max 100€), the cost of the total number of measuring units (let's say 3 - 20€ each depending on quality) and some wiring (price negligible, but let's count with 1€ per MU). So if you want to measure 10 sockets simultaneously, the price you get is somewhere around 140 - 210€.

That's when you use WiFi connected ARDUINO. If you need just the USB connection, the price can be about 70€ lower.

It's obviously applicable for the new homes (or reconstructions), because of the necessary wiring.

When you want to get rid of these wires, you'll have to stream the data from each MU using the power grid wiring to CU (device should comply to homeplug standarts). You can get a full house 200+ Mbps network for TV streaming or whatever else as a bonus, but it'll cost you additional 50€ per socket (if you don't want to use a crappy homeplug adapters).

So, that's what comes to my mind. Anyone interrested?

How about having it just for each circuit, not each device? So you can tell at least how much is the kitchen or living room consuming.