Monitoring whole home energy usage
For over 2 years now I've been using a few Tapo P110M energy monitors from TP-Link in office/ homelab. I first started using them as a way to remotely turn my PC on as I hadn't yet learnt about wake on lan. I had my PC bios set to turn on when ever power came back on. They also let me see if my PC was actually running or not when I was away from home and wanted to use RDP.
Eventually when I got my servers for my homelab I used the P110M's as a way to make sure I want overloading the power strip attached to the wall socket. As well as a way to measure how much the servers were costing me in electricity. And for a whole this worked fine I could track energy usage for my servers and my PC and make sure things where running when I was away from home.
But I wanted a way to track my whole houses usage not just specific devises. Since I'm in a rental I cant just call an electrician to make modifications to the meter box so i had to find a non intrusive way about it.
After doing some quick research online I found that most smart meters have an led that pulses at the rate that electricity is consumed. And sure enough so did my meter. After talking to some coworkers and doing some more research I decide to use an ESP32 and some kind of light detector and link it to home assistant which I was already running.
I ended up combining the scrips from both of these projects:
https://esphome.io/cookbook/power_meter/
And for hardware I used an ESP32-S3 and an Arduino LDR module both from Jaycar.
Since this was a bit of a proof of concept I ended up being a bit lazy with how to power it but I full intend to find a better solution eventually, or at least before we have to replace out gas.