Botswana Electricity – Load Shedding and Demand Side Management

My Facebook and Twitter feeds have been buzzing with confusion for the last couple of weeks since Botswana Power Corporation announced a new scheme to reduce power usage.

Load-shedding has been a fact of life in Botswana for years now, and recent announcements about a new scheme known as Demand Side Management have led to lots of noise across social media, mainly from people enquiring how to calculate their power consumption so they don’t get cut off.

With this post I hope to clarify some of the confusion and help people be better informed, you might even save money when you review what is using power in your house. Continue reading “Botswana Electricity – Load Shedding and Demand Side Management”

Home Energy Monitor Feed

I’m fascinated by numbers (logging my exercise, monitoring the weather, logging fuel consumption) and started logging how much electricity we use at home by reading the meter.  We recently installed a solar hot water system and recent turmoil in Botswana’s power supply got me thinking about solar electricity – so how much energy do we use, and what do we do with it?

After much surfing of the internet and eBay browsing I discovered the OpenEnergyMonitor project, soon afterwards there was a box of goodies in the mail to me: a few emonTx v3s, Raspberry Pis, current transformers, temperature probes and an emonGLCD.

A couple of months ago I managed to sort out the installation (bit of a faff, but that’s another story), and now I can see how much power is being used at home from anywhere with an internet connection (as long as Orange Botswana keeps our Flybox online and the emoncms connection live).  The nice thing about emoncms is that you can also embed the charts in your own website: Continue reading “Home Energy Monitor Feed”