Monitoring Power

Here's a nice post about monitoring power at home - in Portuguese. It makes a reference to RFXCOM - I'll have to follow this through.

One thing bothers me on this post: keeping 2 computers up 24h/day wasting 300Wh doesn't seem like a great way to save power. I'd probably try:

• for the home automation controller, I'd try a low-power device over Linux; an if you can't find Linux support, an old laptop, from the time they didn't heat as much;
• for the VPN, I'd try to wake-up on LAN - probably from the first device;