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  • Student charts electrical usage in real-time, much to Big Brother's delight

    by 
    Ross Miller
    Ross Miller
    01.19.2009

    It's our best guess that University of Florida PhD student Jason Winters woke up at 10:00AM ET this morning and took an approximately 18-minute shower. How did we come to this conclusion? Using an AC clamp attached to an ioBridge, the biomedical engineering scholar measures the main electrical lines entering his house and sends the data to a Google charts widget on his personal blog that reports the kilowatt-hour usage in real time. As a footnote, he presents an example graph of when the hot water is turned on, which then produces close to 4500 watts. That's just over the amount of power he used this morning for about 1100 seconds. Of course, we can't say for certain any of these morning events really transpired, but then again, we don't exactly want to know. Hit up the read links for directions on DIYing this.