PIC Insights
25/04/2026

What does it cost to know?

So, since mid-March, the Power Instantaneous Consumption system has been gathering data, i.e. pulses. Quite a lot, actually: more than 815,000 in 42 days (an average of roughly 19,000 daily).

That harvest does not come for free. Indeed, MID pulse counters themselves draw some power, as do the micro-controllers and the Raspberry Pi that gathers the data and runs the web server to display it.

Thus the first interesting question is: what are the additional costs?

The PIC system relies on:

the 36 MID pulse counters,
a Raspberry Pi 5 (with an NVMe drive),
a USB hub that also powers the Tiny2040s

The 36 MIDs' power draw

The power drawn daily by the MIDs is deduced from the difference between the sum of the power consumptions reported by the 35 MIDs (one for each breaker) and the power consumption reported by the MID tapped on the overall electrical consumption. The result is an average of 17 Wh daily per MID. That amounts to 224 kWh annually (48€ at the current price of 0.21277€/kWh).

The Raspberry Pi's power draw

The Raspberry Pi is powered by the MeanWell connected to the office left shutter breaker. Comparing the power drawn by it to the right office shutter gives a rather good approximation of the power drawn by the MeanWell itself: an average of 107 Wh per day, i.e. 39 kWh annually (8.30€).

The Tiny2040s' power draw

The four Tiny2040s are powered by a dedicated power supply plugged into one of the basement outlets. The MID pulse counter for it reports an average base consumption of 5.59 kWh for 10 days, i.e. 204 kWh annually (43€). But that takes into account a freezer also plugged in the basement outlets. A more accurate estimation suggested by Grok is a power draw of 7 W, i.e. 61.3 kWh annually (13€).

PICs' power draw