[LINK] Monitoring power consumption of individual appliances

[Paul Brooks]

On 9/06/2012 3:07 PM, David Boxall wrote:
> On 8/06/2012 8:32 PM, Ben Elliston wrote:
>> ...
>> This isn't really new:
>> http://www.currentcost.com/products.html
>> ...
> Is it the hardware that's supposed to be new, or the application? Or are 
> you saying that the students aren't doing anything worthy of PhDs?
>
> Which still begs the question: won't all those SMSs get expensive? Come 
> to think of it, wouldn't a wired connection be more energy efficient? 
> Wi-Fi to a land line perhaps, or via the power lines?
It all depends on the mobile plan - carriers offer corporate M2M based plans where
several thousand SIMs can share a data pool, such as those used in car fleets for the
return path of GPS position monitoring. The cost
of operating each SIM in these cases is very small, they don't pay 20c per message
like retail mobile phone plans do.
It need not even be done by individual SMS message, the same effect can be achieved
with small GPRS or mobile data packets.

Paul.