41–50 of 53 posts
If your meter looks like a spinning disk, you're out of luck—for now. I have read where a fellow used an LED and a photodetector to watch his spinning disc and measure how long it takes to go around. Sadly I can't find the web page anymore. Still, it is possible.
I wonder if one can ask his electric company to upgrade his meter?
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It seems terrible to have a device in my house measuring electricity (the meter), then put a reader on it, stream the data over wifi, over the internet, to a company with a bank of servers and several full time employees then process it then stream it back over the mobile phone network, all in the interest of saving energy.
I think the folks at WattVision would concur completely. It's kind of crazy, and the idea of Smart Meters would eliminate the light sensor and wire part of the deal. I would guess that WattVision and the others in this growing market are banking on the idea that 1) the electric utilities in the US move incredibly slowly, and 2) it's not just about electricity, and even if you got a smart meter for electricity, those…
Now, back to the topic. I live in southern Ontario and virtually every building is heated by natural gas, and in more rural locals oil is more common, however the prices have begun matching between gas and oil where it has to be delivered. The only properties I see that are heated electrically are in apartment buildings where heat is only truly lost through far less than 1/6th of your property's surface area.
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...
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There are several reasons you might want live power monitoring: If you insulate houses for a living and want to prove that the heater is switching on less often (paying off the cost of the insulation) you want live power monitoring on that one circuit. You can then correlate the power saving with outside temperature and time of day. If you run office buildings, real time measurement can help you localise faulty HVAC…
In the typical case such a device is really only useful in the first month or two. After that all optimizations have been done. So I think that this monthly subscription model is a bit flawed in that regard. I'm probably wrong..
There are a lot of measures that can reduce people's power usage for a short period of time. For instance, advertisements to ask people to turn off unused lights can have a temporary effect on power usage. Making those savings last is much more difficult. Hopefully ongoing power monitoring can help there.
For Gridspy, I'd love to provide a free minimal service, a highly affordable normal service and a premium service with long range high resolution data.
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…
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.
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For this particular device it would mean that they would loose their monthly subscription (as I don't think people would accept to pay a monthly fee for a clientside app). This is their business model.
It seems terrible to have a device in my house measuring electricity (the meter), then put a reader on it, stream the data over wifi, over the internet, to a company with a bank of servers and several full time employees then process it then stream it back over the mobile phone network, all in the interest of saving energy.
Having an independent monitoring company (Gridspy or WattVision) whose sole task is to help you gain insights from your power usage data is more likely to benefit you than depending on a large power organisation to do so.
Also, the goals of measuring power for billing purposes differ from those of measuring power to save power.
If you are billing you want highly accurate, irregular samples, with a single meter per customer (no matter how many buildings that covers).
If you are trying to save power, you want affordable, perhaps less accurate sensors measuring as many different channels as possible at the lowest price possible. Gridspy takes this approach.
WattVision is providing you with what the smart meter solution should have been, today. It does that by giving you a single channel of accurate, fairly realtime online.
The roundtrip from your house and back sounds horrible to us hackers - but to the population at large it makes installation and router configuration non issues. It also makes software upgrades on-line much easier.
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…
Yay Savraj!
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A digital meter doesn't have a spinning dial, it reads current a different way. It is able to transmit its readings in several forms, bnoth through a display on the front, but mainly they were designed to allow remote meter reading by the power company -- drive by, instead of having to actually look at the dials. A smart meter is a digital meter but that can intercommunicate -- over a network -- either with the rest…
Regrettably, I am still not enlightened. Isn't remote meter reading a form of communication over a network?
Smart meters transmit their power data through the power lines somewhat like ADSL over the phone lines. At the substation, they connect that to a normal network and can read your meter without visiting. In some cases smart meters work through the mobile phone network with GPRS or SMS messages.
Even smarter meters can download instructions from the power company to turn off AC or change the cost of your electricity at different times of day. This would replace the current ripple controllers that do similar things with more limitations.
Really cool meters have some sort of communications network within the house so the homeowner can purchase smart displays that talk to the meter and use it as a source of interesting information.
I work in the Energy/Utility field and just got back from a “Smart Gird” conference where smart meters (i.e. real time interval metering) was discussed at length. Although these types of devices are really cool to “energy geeks” like me, if you look at the energy used today at the author’s house, it amounts to less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. So, the big question is, until electricity prices really increase (w…
Gridspy in a typical business will pay for itself within a year, as most businesses use in excess of $1000 a month. All it takes is the opportunity to educate the employees to turn off PCs at night and to identify the expensive lights in the building and the power usage goes down by 10%.
I'll soon have some nice case studies to back up this widely held belief in the power of live monitoring.