Picked up the TED 5000 home energy monitor and began, well, monitoring our home electrical usage. Easy to install and use; once you allow it to connect onto your home wireless network (Glad the security was working). It lets you analyze your usage down to the second.
Once you get it up and running the question becomes what now?
Well, first off it only stores 2 days of data. humh, google likes keeping data for ever and you guessed it. Google’s PowerMeter app will gladly store a life time of 1 second energy usage data. Microsofts Hohm doesn’t play with TED, so no joy there.
Looking at the graphs you can see your baseline, constantly on energy drain…time to find all those adapters that suck the juice 24×7. And you can see that the air conditioner dwarfs every other device in the home. You can also see some cycling loads (dehumidifier? freezer?) and you begin to see where you might start looking for some savings. you can tell TED what device your going to turn on, and it will learn that devices profile and isolate it’s usage and cost.
Get your utility bill out and you can plug in cost data and CO2 info and look at in terms of your personal contribution to global warming or the $$$’s your spending every hour 🙁
Now, to get google to add PowerMeter to their data api and you could get your data back as a feed to do some fun mashups……