Raspberry Pi Home Automation
Well I've had some spare time over the last week (hopefully many others have as well!) and wanted to update my gang of Raspberry Pi's that I use for home automation. Right now my home automation is primarily remote control of LED strip lights that I have installed in the toe kicks of my kitchen counters and bathrooms. It is very handy for Laura (my wife) and I to remotely turn the lights on and off from our phones or tablets at night if we just want a little light in the kitchen or need to make a run to the bathroom (grin).
This is a photo of an old PC power supply used to supply the 12VDC for the LED light strips and 5VDC for the pi, Raspberry Pi, JFET Switch Board & Dual Relay board. I'll break everything down and explain each item in future posts (This, I'm hoping, will give me the incentive to post on a regular basis!!!)
I'm curious about how much energy is consumed by the pi and lights, so I hooked in a kill-a-watt meter to measure the consumption. This 3.13 kWh is over the span of 65 days (measured the uptime of my raspberry pi). 3.13kWh / ~ 2 months = 1.565 kWh / month x 0.068 / kWh (current Alberta energy rate) = 0.106 or about 10 cents per month! And we use the LED lighting pretty much every night for a few hours. I'm not sure how accurate the kill-a-watt meter is, but I'm pretty confident that it is giving me a good approximation!
Thanks for viewing!
Robin
Posted with STEMGeeks
Congratulations @robingreig! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP
Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:
Looks good, I have been thinking about putting up a board like that to mount some of my Raspberry Pi's than run all the time recording temperatures.
Glad to see you posting.
Yes, I was thinking of doing the same for the pi's I have on my desk downstairs. It would certainly take up less space mounting them on the wall.