I’m interested in knowing more about power usage across my house. I could probably get some smart home outlets and get some basic info, maybe even find something that ties in to Home Assistant, but I’m wondering what the next step up is? What’s the ‘buying old server hardware’ version? Ideally something I could pull stats from and record monthly usage. Pretty Ubiquiti like dashboards.
The cheapest way to get your sum-total consumption with granularity in the range of perhaps 5 minutes would be to use an RTL-SDR (around $15) to listen to the data transmitted by many utility meters.
Next step up to collect per-circuit usage might be to purchase something like Emporia Vue.
https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome