There's not yet an app for that, but there's this piece of crap for that.

For just about forever I have been interested in monitoring my power usage, mainly out of curiosity, but also to manage my electricity usage. So I was pretty stoked when I found this cool thing at the thrift store for $13!  

The Black & Decker EM100B Power Monitor. 

WHOooooooaaA!

This extremely cheesy and dated video explains everything you need to know.

The opening line...is priceless.

It is pretty much a no-brainer that if most of us had real-time feedback on our electricity usage, we would use less of it. Especially true for us cheapskates. And that is exactly what this nifty gadget does!

It’s fairly easy to install. There is no wiring! You just align a sensor to a port (or the spinning disk thing) on the electric meter (depending on the era of the meter), and it sends information wirelessly to a display showing usage rate. If you program in your electricity cost, it will show you a dollar rate.

Compatible with most power meters. (Mine was the yellow one.)

Look at these features! Look at that snazzy display! haha.

In today’s world with the internet, apps, wi-fi gadgets, and (for the extremely lucky) smart-meters, this gizmo seems so archaic! Hilariously so, in fact. Just watch the video above. The mere fact that it uses that silly display, makes me laugh (as opposed to just piggy-backing onto a smartphone), and where is all my historical, searchable, beautifully-displayed, filterable, instantly-accessible data !?! Pa-leeeease. But it does do the job. This thing dates back to at least 2004-ish and used-to cost about $110 new!  If you want one, too bad, they don't sell them anymore. haha. There is 1 used one on Amazon. 

Being the nerd that I apparently am, I have gotten overly excited about several similar (and more advanced) services in the recent past. These include: Google PowerMeter (now deprecated), Opower (which has completely evolved away from being the power monitoring app I wanted it to be), and Nest: the learning thermostat.  All really interesting energy-usage feedback technologies.

This thing will probably push me to move into investing in solar, which is another dream of mine, but until I have a smart-meter and solar panels, when I am selling electricity back to the electric company, this gizmo will have to suffice. 

Anyway, I don't know if it will affect my energy usage or not, but it is cool (and a little painful) to see how it jumps up when the fridge kicks on or when we start cooking dinner.