This describes the situation in a nutshell

As you can see they report electricity consumption around with approximately 15% difference. One is a Wattson - the other one a costco Envir sensor.

Next - what is the real usage?

The stair lights are coming along nicely - as a test I now have LED strips glued under the nose of 2 set of steps, and a Jeenode with a PIR movement sensor hanging over the flight of stairs.

The LED strips are controlled by a LED node (from Jeelabs) to give a quick ramp up to the desired light level, and then slowly down over a minute or so. This is one of the nice features of the LEDnode - it has configureable "ramps" or "profiles" with the ability to pre-program these and store them in the LEDnode - ready to be triggered by a short command string from another node.

The software has now been written - and works reasonably well, but will need quite a bit of tweaking.

More to come.

I've spent part of Christmas and the new year refurbishing our stairs (more about that later) - they turned out very nicely indeed.

But now on to the electronics part of this.

- Every step will have a (visually hidden) LED strip under the edge of the step, all connected to a JeeLabs LEDnode, and triggered by another Jeenode with a PIR sensor hanging over the steps (hidden among books on a bookshelf).

So far I have written the necessary software to test the coverage and response time of the motion sensor, and written the necessary routines for the LED node to be triggered by the home monitoring server.

This should be fun.

From the raspberry.pi blog - some seriously important information :

After we installed proper electronic thermostats and linked them to our house monitoring system I've tracked the gas usage for the whole house

It looks a bit funny for the first 6 months of 2010 as I did not do manual reading at this stage, but the graph tells a interesting story. Btw. December 2010 was substantially colder than December 2011 as well.

Added to that we got 700£ back at the end of 2010 due to reduction of usage reduced usage compared to previous years. This is looking promising as well.