HOBO by OnsetHOBO by Onset UX120-018 Data Logger

My expectations have so far been greatly exceeded. The free software works well. I have not as yet attempted to validate the readings except to eyeball compare it to two other power meters. So far it seem at least reasonable but my impression is that it is accurate.My initial use has been to perform thermal/power qualification on gaming PC's running Blender, Cinebench, OCCT power and other such workloads. The power consumption plots collected in those workloads seem to match the system activity very well so (at the minimum) I feel confident in using it at least as a relative measure. I have attached a sample plot of the power draw of a system running Cinebench R23 on a PC that hits 40K points in the multicore workload. The plot exhibits the expected behavior though it shows an interesting and unexpected (to me) change in the RMS voltage over time.There are two main reasons I wanted this device. (1) my UPS seems to be shutting down due to excessive load om overnight OCCT thermal testing. I want to record the power draw of the UPS to insure that the power is not shutting off. I also want to record the power draw of the system itself to better understand the circumstances.Notes:(0) The construction and quality is quite good though it is a bit expensive considering what is provided.(1) I will eventually try to run the software on Linux under Wine. I believe it should just work.(2) It comes with two AAA batteries preinstalled. The manual claims these should last for 6 months in the worst case. This is good because annoyingly, you have to significantly dismantle the power measurement unit to replace the batteries.(3) As far as I can see, there is no simple means of implementing a scripted start and stop of a measurement.(4) This meter will be good for monitoring PC power consumption whilst gaming. It should at least be useful determine whether there is a power aspect of game crashes.(5) the fastest sample rate is one per second. I'd like it to be faster.(6) I suppose the name HOBO is acronym for something. :)

It was working normally for a while but now the display doesn’t work properly. I am unsure of how it broke.I've reached out to their customer service but haven't heard back.

From limited use so far, appears to fall within design parameters. I don't give it 5 stars because in order to change the internal battery one must open the entire case. Also, the HOBOware app, which is very powerful, is somewhat confusing to use and limited in certain areas. Case in point, it is near impossible to remove or edit an obvious erroneous data point.

The unit does everything its advertised to do. But I was very surprised by two things: (1) the unit itself is so intuitive, that almost anyone can use it without reading the users manual; but don't- the manual has some very interesting info that you would not know without reading; and (2) the most surprising aspect of the kit is how user friendly, robust, and powerful the software that the unit uploads to is. This is what really makes the unit extremely valuable as a data logger. You have lots of options as to what to log, how frequently, etc, as well as what to view, how to view it and so on once uploaded to a PC. The graphing software adds all kinds of annotations to the graph, like start/stop time, power glitches, etc, as well as several types of zoom capability.

I love this logger. I'm using it to determine how much solar power I need for my pop up camper. There is no guessing with this baby installed! Be sure to get the HOBOware software and cable.

This did exactly what it was supposed to do. No problems at all