The difficulty of monitoring electricity usage is a hindrance that prevents people from saving power. This is because there is a lack of visual cues or a push for them to realize the rate of their consumption. In this work, we designed and built an external system to monitor power consumption using the power meters. The system uses a NodeMCU microprocessor, and the data is processed and stored in the ThingSpeak cloud service. The device attaches externally to a power meter and uses the LED which flashes, as input. The data is output from ThingSpeak to a web app that is designed to be user-friendly. The data is presented in graphs that plot the rate of usage against time and amount of power used in an equivalent Pula (Botswana Currency) unit. The system has been designed and tested in Botswana on the Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) residential meters.

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