Electrical – wall outlet power meter that I can interface with from a computer

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I'm wondering if there is a wall outlet power meter that I can somehow interface with from a computer. I'm aware of all the google power meter products, but those are for an entire house. I'm trying to measure the electricity usage of a single outlet during an experiment without having to physically read the power meter and recording the result. Let me know if I need to explain anything.

Best Answer

If you're willing to do a little modification, you can use a Kill-A-Watt and hook it up to your computer.

Adafruit has a "Tweet-a-Watt" project that interfaces with a Kill-A-Watt and wirelessly sends the power readings to the receiving unit (which they then hooked up to tweet the current readings)

Kill-A-Watt and XBee

In the Adafruit forums, I found a guy who was trying to read the Kill-A-Watt directly with an Arduino, instead of wirelessly sending the readings. You could use an Arduino and read the measurements directly into a serial console on your computer and save the results to a file that way.