I would like to know if anyone out there has a plan for collection data that uses as little power as possible. All the suggestions that I have been given to date includes running a computer to collect the data, but this can cost about 300 watts or more continuously, not to mention the cost of a PC to do this task, since it will be more than 50 ft from the inverter. There must be a economic way to collect data, in both power and total cost. If anybody has any good suggestions let me know.

I bought, for about $120, a kilowatt hour meter from Hileah products in Fla.
during the day i run the electricity thru it before it goes to my circuit breaker and it goes forward.
at night it slowly goes backwards as i take the 20watt/hour hit the inverter uses (480 watts/day)

(to date 4,507KWH, abt 1,046KWH/yr)
robert in Rockville maryland

I have used for about 3 years computers based on the mini-itx standard

www.mini-itx.com can give you an overview of the available boards.

the 400/600mhz boards , with a laptop disk use about 10 watts. This gives the advantage of a window XP platform , meaning you can run anything on it but very low power usage.

Compared to the 2-3 ghz machines , there slow , but for a basic PC or running data-logging , web-serving there good little boxes. This web-site was run on one for two years !

I actually have 2 spare ones now that I would sell cheap ($75) , send me a private message if your interested