Home energy monitoring projects are certainly nothing new, but the incredible advances we’ve seen in the type of hardware and software available for DIY projects over the last decade has really pushed the state-of-the-art forward. He’s even offering hardware kits for anyone who’s more interested in experimenting with the software side of things than building the PCB. While has already done the community a great service by releasing the hardware and software under an open source license, he’s also produced some absolutely phenomenal documentation for the project that’s really a valuable resource for anyone who wants to roll their own monitoring system. Data is pulled every 0.5 seconds from a MCP3008 ADC connected to up to five six current sensors to provide real-time utilization statistics, and visualized with Grafana so you can see all of the information at a glance. This project includes provides software and hardware to be used in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi to keep tabs on not just home energy consumption, but also production if your home has a solar array or other method of generating its own power.

At a minimum one of these setups involves a microcontroller and some kind of clamp-on current sensor, but if you’re looking for resources to take things a bit farther, this Raspberry Pi energy monitoring system created by would be a great place to start.

As the world has become more environmentally conscious, we’ve seen an uptick in projects that monitor or control home energy use.

Raspberry pi monitor network usage