This Money-Saving Project Can Turn An Arduino Into A Home Energy Monitor – SlashGear

The project’s creators chose to use Home Assistant for their hack, an open-source smart home platform that doesn’t run through the cloud, so it’s far less vulnerable to potential connectivity issues or privacy concerns. However, it requires a little ingenuity to connect with certain devices.

If there’s one thing the users of Hackster boast in spades, though, it’s ingenuity. With this retrofitting project, its creators combined an Arduino with a Finder Energy Meter (a device dedicated to helping users keep detailed track of their energy expenditure). They connected the Finder directly to the home’s electrical system and, with some clever code, created a self-built energy monitor that links to Home Assistant, which you can download and try yourself if you don’t mind a little DIY wiring.

Once everything is set up, the Finder’s recordings will be available within Home Assistant, including Total Current, Total Power, Frequency, and more.

This is far from a universally practical approach, and only those qualified to do so should perform DIY on the main power supply in this way (it’s not legal to do some in some places either, the project notes). Nevertheless, seeing what technology like this and Raspberry Pi can do in this area is fascinating.