The software measure our gas usage in the house is coming along slowly - I have attached a LDR to one of the Jeenodes and found out the light level when just the pilot light is on, and the light level when the burner is on.

so I can now detect the transitions when the boiler turns on and when it turns off, and from there calculate how long it was turned on for.

This all looks a bit strange at the moment :

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For our home monitoring system I have long had a problem -

- We do measure the amount of electricity we use, and plot/graph this quite accurately

- We do use gas for heating (2 boilers) plus a hob in the kitchen.

Measuring usage of gas seems to be difficult with any easily accessible technology, and the very oldfashioned meter we have for the house will not work with any of the methods I have seen so far - as we do not have either a flashing led nor a rotating disc.

So while trying to think through this I came to the following conclusion :

- The gas usage for the hob is probably little compared to the boilers, and there is very little we can do to reduce it, therefore I will concentrate on the usage by the boilers.
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Electricity usage as recorded by the Wattson

(Click for larger image)

and as recorded and graphed on pachube for a period of a month

This is our house electricity usage - read in realtime by Ruby software running on a Mac Mini (home grown software as such) through the Wattsons USB port.
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Our weather station is now online at http://www.gisvold.co.uk:81/weather/LWCWeb/ - as a experiment until I get all the data gathered in one place.

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One of my original problems with LWC (Lightsoft Weather Center) was the lack of any ability to access the measurements done by the control panel - which has internal sensors for humidity and temperature.

The easiest way would be using their custom CGI access, but this is limited to a set number of variables in the call - none of the internal measurements are in this set.

The second way of getting hold of it was setting up a page using the LWC variables (a LWC process picks up all files in a specific directory, does substitutions on any LWC tags it finds in these files, and copies them to another directory with these substitutions done.

The problem was that there were no tags for internal readings, except as part of a graphic file.
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