[colug-432] Monitoring an analog, external device's power usage?

[Peter Kukla]

I'm a new home owner, and I have a sump pump in the basement that I would like to monitor electronically.

Best case scenario...my complete solution provides me with electronic log data in a way that I can access any time via a network connection.

My objectives are twofold.  


1.  Monitor the amount of water pumped from the basement to get a "baseline" value that I can compare against when trying to improve the property's drainage

2.  Setup an early-warning alarm system that would alert me if the sump pump failed to work for some reason.

The sump pump currently plugs into a power outlet.  The only way I can see to monitor this sump pump is to monitor the power usage.

Does anyone out there have any Linux-friendly solutions for monitoring power use by an analog external device?  If I could grab that information, then I could use some Linux-based device to process the information and dump it to the network.  I'm just not sure how to go about monitoring the power usage of the sump pump.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated,


-peter


.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/attachments/20130126/278d06d4/attachment.html