I'm always glad to see developments in energy monitoring, but every time I see a tool that monitors a home's power meter it just leaves me wanting to see more.
It seems that what we really need is a cheap electrical socket monitoring device so that we can get real-time data about each appliance in our house read out to a central web-app. It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that. If we're going to do something about using too much power, we need to understand what the culprits are.
I know that there are socket monitors on the market, but why do they all have expensive screens and buttons and stuff? It seems that they should be 10 times cheaper and feed their data straight to a web-app.
http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/11/design/green-des...
It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that.
Your monthly electricity bill does give you a monthly snapshot of your last month's usage, but the primary point of these devices appears to be moment to moment usage stats. The instantaneous data can act as a feedback mechanism that a monthly snapshot makes difficult. Integrating power monitoring at the device level would also be a nice step forward.
This low cost individual circuit monitoring is where Gridspy is going, although it will take some time (and high production volume) to get the price down that low.
It seems that what we really need is a cheap electrical socket monitoring device so that we can get real-time data about each appliance in our house read out to a central web-app. It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that. If we're going to do something about using too much power, we need to understand what the culprits are.
I know that there are socket monitors on the market, but why do they all have expensive screens and buttons and stuff? It seems that they should be 10 times cheaper and feed their data straight to a web-app. http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/11/design/green-des...