TwistedKestrel wrote:I guess I could look into reasonably hackable smart plugs, I kinda thought there would be a consumer product for this. Pretty much anyone who needed an energy monitor in my province would benefit from it, at least for monitoring appliances that are always using non-trivial amounts of power.
There is. It's called a kill-a-watt.
If they are "always using" power, than what are you really monitoring? For instance, if a TV at idle uses 10 watts, then all three TIME-based tiers (which is why I keep asking...) means is that you have a spreadsheet that applies the appropriate rate for the different time periods.
Even expensive devices with extensive logging don't magically give you a useful answer: you have to correlate that output with your particular rate scheme. Sure, it knows what watts when, but it doesn't know how to price them appropriately.
You pretty much end up doing the same thing, and the only thing the monitoring would give you is if the power usage is very variable in an unpredictable way. Which isn't very typical of consumer usage, etc...
EDIT: For instance, in mining for crypto like in your OP, the power usage isn't very variable: Your GPU or ASIC is running full-bore doing something incredibly repetitive. So, in that case, you measure how much power your rig is using during mining with a regular Kill-a-watt, and then... multiply by the various rates, right? At that point we would seem to be done, or what am I missing here?
Since you are doing this on a computer,
even if you are randomly turning the mining on and off, you can log that with the computer, right?
Again, what am I missing here?