Twelve Years of Electricity Consumption Data

Twelve years ago I had an idea: if I could figure out a way to read my electricity meter in real time, and post my usage in public, and then convince some friends to do the same, perhaps the social pressure with being public with something that’s usually not would reduce our collective usage.

This idea became The Social Consumption Project, and I received a microgrant from the City of Charlottetown to help fund it.

I identified a simple, inexpensive, USB device, the Grid Insight AMRUSB-1, that could read both electricity and water meters in Charlottetown (which sent out their readings, unencrypted, to allow meter readers to read them on regular drive-bys), and I came up with a Raspberry Pi-based solution for reading meters and uploading readings to a web-based database,

Over the life of the project there were 8 households that allowed me to read and publish their consumption data. While the meter-reading part of the solution was rock-solid, the “hooking a Raspberry Pi up to home wifi” part of the solution was not, and the Achilles heel of the project was that when things went wrong I had to haul a monitor and keyboard to my friends’ homes, interrupt their day, and figure out where things had gone wrong.

Partner homes eventually dropped off, one by one, due this complexity, to the point where our house was the last one standing. But our own AMRUSB-1 and Raspberry Pi have been dutifully gathering and archiving water and electricity usage data since the very beginning, just under 800,000 readings in all, ever since.

Until the morning of April 23, 2026, when our electricity meter got swapped out for a new “smart” meter, as part of Maritime Electric’s meter replacement program, and the radio went cold.

We were always in a funny situation here in Charlottetown with regards to meters: Maritime Electric’s meters were new enough to emit radio data in the clear—older meters needed to be read face-to-face—but old enough that the idea that sending out this data in the clear was a privacy issue. 

(To their credit, the idea that consumer-level technology would allow the data to be read by civilians when the meters were first installed wouldn’t have appeared possible.)

Those of us interested in our consumption were the beneficiaries of this “kind of smart meter” interregnum between dumb and smart. But now it’s over.

For posterity, I’m publishing the entire archive of electricity readings here, 785,211 readings in all, running from October 26, 2014 until April 23, 2026 at 9:51 a.m., when the old meter was disconnected: electricity-readings-archive.csv.zip.

Here’s what out consumption looks like, year by year:

Here’s what it looks like on a chart:

(The increase in 2023 is something I dove into earlier this year, and traced to roof heating wires and a dehumidifier.)

Here’s the same data, but with seasons highlighted:

What’s clear from this chart is that our usage has seasonal variations, and that the summer is where we peak. I’m almost certain this is due to air conditioning, which we’ve used every summer, and more intensively in recent years.

While our real-time home data archiving has ended, there’s a promise, sometime soon, that Maritime Electric’s planned customer portal, using the new meters as the data source, will provide the same data:

More data on your usage: AMI metering will provide you with detailed energy usage information that you can easily access via your account. Over the next several years, we’ll be rolling out a new customer portal. Once available, this system will allow you to view your energy consumption online rather than waiting for your monthly bill. You’ll be able to see how daily habits, seasonal changes, or new appliances impact your usage and find opportunities to save.

In the meantime, our water meter continues to broadcase our water usage, in the clear, over the its radio, so we’ll continue to gather and archive that.

The deep spark that gave rise to all of this was this piece in WIRED from 2001, which I noted in 2007, and which hung around the back of my mind for another 4 years before I took action. I couldn’t have predicted that, all these years later, the machine I built would be still chugging along, albeit without one of its important sources.