One of the important properties of IOT projects is power consumption, especially when it works standalone and takes its power from renewable energy source. With this information you can see how your device performs and where you have place to improve.

I set up power monitoring, based on Adafruit INA219 breakout and another ESP8266 powered from main electricity supply. The data rate and amount can be high, so I decided to go with MQTT protocol. I set up MQTT backend, mySQL database and simple front-end for monitoring data online. Everything is hosted at my online server and has no limitations of the data transfers.

Based on this information, I decided to put station to sleep every 100 sec. The resulted power consumption is very satisfying. My battery has capacity of 2500 mah and it recharged every day from solar panels. It looks like I can put a few more consumers.