Atom feed of this blogHouse power measurement plan
This article taught me how new home power meters often have an IR LED that pulses with power usage. blalor checked his meter and found a 10ms pulse.
I took a camcorder out to my own meter (GE kv2cs) and it does seem to be pulsing out the front. My plan is to follow the guides on irmetermon, probably just schematic.adc, and connect my phototransistor to a pin on the closest parallel port which I'm already interfacing several other things to.
I hope I'll be able to read the parport fast enough to not miss pulses, and I hope I don't get too much extra IR light coming from the sun. That parport will eventually change to an arduino, and then I'll be able more easily to do the analog sensing and calibration that the irmetermon project is mainly about.
The goal is to get instantaneous power usage data into my graphite server, where I will be able to plot it along many other measurements, including solar panel generation, temperature, ISP bandwidth, and computer clock speeds.