While not publishing it, my weather station uploads my indoor temperatures to weather underground. The plaintext password is in every packet. It uses unencrypted HTTP.

My TV continues to chatter to random servers on the internet long after it has turned off. It transmits to a telemetry server on every single button press.

My air conditioners drain a lot more power when I haven’t cleaned the filters. It’s almost double.

A chromecast will try to bypass your router’s DNS and go straight to Google’s. It is constantly pulling data even if you’re not using it. I’m fairly certain it’s that slideshow. It’s not cached at all.

OP’s post is a good lesson in the value of metadata and how important data privacy protections are.

My old Samsung printer can enter a state where it consumes ~100W without doing anything meaningful. It’s not obvious what is wrong, but without power monitoring I would have never realized this.

CO2 levels raise astonishingly fast when people are present in a room.

I have mice visiting my garage and I can tell when by looking at the motion sensor history.

My uninsulated roof stays frost free even at -15°C.

By recording the electricity use in my house I noticed a 1500 watt spike at a semi-regular interval. It would happen every 50 minutes and lasted for a few minutes. While overall not that much of a draw, it sort of drove me crazy not knowing what it was…

Then I discovered that it was our septic system’s effluent pump (the leach field is up on a hill). The pump was turning on way too often because ground water was leaking into the pump chamber. It’s not supposed to do that. The tank was about 45 years old, so not a huge surprise really.

Basically, my home automation (or tracking, really) lead to an $8k concrete tank replacement (more or less, as we had the guy do some additional stuff while he was here).

That’s not really a bad thing though. Maintaining your house is very important. Our well had failed a coliform test the previous year, and I’ve yet to get it re-tested to see if the new tank fixed that little problem. I’ve been giving everything some time to settle down.

The humidity in my apartment is affected far more by cooking than by showering.

I’ve caught the front door and garage door left open several times (kids)

I found out my garage under my bedroom is primarily why my room is hard to heat and likely has poor insulation in the ceiling.

I found out my Samsung TV was sending a LOT of data home.

I know every time my Roomba gets stuck so I can go and locate it before the battery dies.

I know when my unraid Dockers fail to update and accidentally delete the old containers, so that I can go and re-add them.

One of my children were doing remote learning and I would get an alarm if he didn’t get up in the morning and start using his Chromebook.

Most recently I discovered my house naturally has one of those “the sun will shine exactly here at one time of the year” things going on, like a treasure hunting movie trope. A reflective mosaic hung on my neighbor’s shed is in the right spot that, in late December, sun reflection causes a arc of sunshine to slowly sweep over and brighten up spots on my back porch for an hour or so.

I recently made an ESPHome based weather station that includes a LUX sensor. I was updating a lighting automation so it would turn on sooner during dark mornings using the new sensor and I noticed a daily spike in light. The neighbor put up that mosaic several years ago and it took a HA histogram for me to notice.

My electrical system always drops in voltage around 8AM. Power usage in my house remains constant, so maybe more demand on the grid when people are getting ready for work?

If it turns into a problem I wonder if you report that to your power provider they can investigate it. I assume it isn’t much of a drop though 240v to 210v ish drop.

We had a UPS that would report under voltage every winter at a remote radio tower. We sent the info to the power company and a few months later found the issue and we never got an alert again.

I can see if someone is on the toilet and having a Nr.2 by checking the power draw of the Japanese style toilet. (I also have a presence detector). I do not monitor the first part intentionally, though.

I unintentionally catched some birds eating on camera and that led to us installing a designated bird cam - in a 3D printed bird house. The AI model for identification is still in the works though - there aren’t any good European based ones available as open source so I still will need to work out my own.

I found out the kid is reading FAR more than thought and is using the PC far less than I thought. Sorry kiddo!

CO2 is going up far more than expected,yes. What I found more interesting, though, is the direct connection between the humidity and my sinus infections - I always get them if my room air gets to dry.

Cooking releases an ungodly amount of VOC and uses FAR more electric energy than I thought.

And: After two years of optimisation I can control the temperature in two very sun exposed rooms just by using the covers and a weather forecast extremely well. Means they are up to 4° colder in the summer than before and 10° warmer in winter. Sadly this does not apply to all rooms.

And last but not least: Heating is the only point where home automation really saves energy here.

My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.

One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.

The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it’s ever been where I live.

Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.

Outdoor temperatures always go up when it’s raining.

Are you saying the outside weather temperature rises when it starts to rain, or am I understanding that incorrectly?

• My TV’s power consumption is basically doubled when the input is running at 2160p compared to 1080p.
• Running the portable AC in my office for more than 24 hours causes it to cycle off and on because the humidity collection sump fills up and needs to be emptied (it throws a completely unhelpful error of ‘Low Temperature’).

Minor and obvious thing, but seeing it plotted finally made me recognize it: the temperature on my balcony is consistently lower than temperature inside my fridge for a good part of the year.

Onkyo home cinema amp was eating 50W when being “off”.
Fixed it with smart multi-plug which power the amp when the tv is on, and cut power when tv is off.

Wait, how do you make your smart bulbs turn off and on automatically when you enter/leave a room? I’ve been using them for years and I always have to manually trigger them with an app! And how are you measuring power usage?