

Tom has a new crush. It's called the WattVision Energy Monitor. - pg
http://www.energycircle.com/blog/2010/02/03/toms-new-crush-the-wattvision-energy-monitor

======
F_J_H
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 (which would be a nightmare for
politicians), will the average person really care? I love the device and think
it is a great concept, but I wonder if it will have a very wide appeal.

~~~
tomharrisonjr
Well, I am the guy that lives at the author's house. We are saving over
$100/month as a result of the reductions we have made. I agree with your
general position, but there's at least a niche market out there, and growing
rather fast, actually.

~~~
F_J_H
That is interesting. At the Smart Energy conference I spoke about, one
Canadian utility that has implemented smart meters and Time of Use pricing
found virtually no evidence that people were reducing their consumption. If
anything, load was shifted from peak periods to the off peak periods on the
weekend. You would have been a great example of what they were hoping for.

I am curious though. If you are using about .09 or .10 an hour in total (for
the brief period I looked at the graph), how were you able to achieve such
high savings? Did you get rid of unnecessary appliances, or simply find ways
to reduce consumption?

~~~
tomharrisonjr
I had found some reasonably scientific research done a while back in a pilot
program showing 15% reduction by otherwise passive people. I can't find the
study now, so I could be full of it :-)

Actually, shifting to off-peak is a good outcome since fewer spinning reserve
plants (usually the least efficient) are needed. But, as you say, not really
the desired outcome.

My baseline use tends to run at about 300W. We first did obvious things like
replace some of our lighting with CFL, and we got rid of an old chest freezer
we didn't need. We changed behavior through learning to turn off lights when
we left a room. There were some no-brainer things (my stereo apparently allows
multi-room hookups, and if you have the buttons turned on, it uses several
hundred watts to do nothing. I replaced a fileserver + routers with an Apple
Time Capsule and saved 100+ watts. We use the dryer differently. And we
installed a few BITS smart strips. The reason our savings are high is partly
because I live in the Boston area, where our electricity rate is currently
$0.19/kWh, I think. Bottom line was that we made a lot of little changes. I
have written about most of them in my personal blog, called fivepercent.us if
you're interested.

------
wesley
Something like <http://www.currentcost.com> is much cheaper, has a one time
cost, includes a display, and can send statistics to several user contributed
apps as well.

A new version is due soon which will _probably_ introduce wireless transfer to
the pc and compatibility with google powermeter..

~~~
tomharrisonjr
I have tested the currentcost and it's a different thing in some ways --
WattVision has the distinct advantage of not requiring you to open the
electrical box, for one, but also doesn't have a display (yet). CurrentCost is
all about the monitor, similar to Owl. I think everyone is working towards
some sort of online feed; TED 5000 has one that hooks to Google PowerMeter,
but WattVision is a somewhat simpler and more extensible design IMHO.
Honestly, I like them all -- monitoring electricity has helped me identify
innumerable little ways to use less; the big picture is that I now use about
1/2 the electricity I did a few years ago.

~~~
jodrellblank
Are you using less electricity to do the same things, or are you living
differently in order to lower your electricity use because electricity use is
in your focus?

If so, would those changes be annoying to live with if you weren't so
interested in your electricity use - if you tried to get a random person to
reduce their electricity use in the same ways, would they say "sod that, it
sounds too hard/stupid/cheap/complex"?

~~~
tomharrisonjr
This is a really good question. To be sure, there's a selection bias going on
here, which I think explains why I have been able to reduce our household
consumption by more than 50%, where in controlled studies (e.g. by utilities
that have installed similar meters in their houses) observed reductions are
around 15%.

But I would also say that I have done this over the course of several years,
and while many reductions were ones I got with no pain or expense almost
immediately, others were ones where I bought a new router, for example, that
allowed me to get rid of my fileserver/router setup. I bought several BITS
Smart Strips to reduce phantom load. None of these change my lifestyle in any
way, but they do require some initiative.

Tom

------
aminuit
Not in the article, but worth mentioning: Wattvision is a YC Winter 09
company.

------
thinksketch
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...](http://www.thinksketchdesign.com/2009/02/11/design/green-design-
design/the-kill-a-watt-killer-energy-monitors-should-be-10-times-cheaper)

~~~
mbergins
_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.

------
maxklein
This looks very cool. I wish I could get my hands on one.

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gruseom
Yay Savraj!

~~~
gridspy
He is getting some serious PR. A class act.

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jws
_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.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
I wonder if one can ask his electric company to upgrade his meter?

~~~
savrajsingh
You can, depends on your power company.

------
wmf
Can someone explain the difference between a digital meter and a smart meter?

~~~
tomharrisonjr
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 of the electric grid system, or even with
devices inside your house.

~~~
wmf
Regrettably, I am still not enlightened. Isn't remote meter reading a form of
communication over a network?

~~~
gridspy
Normal and digital meters can only be read by physically visiting the
property. Sometimes you don't have to physically look at Digital meters
because they have a RF signal.

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.

------
gcb
You actually have to install something to get this graph?

In Brazil you get a graph of your consumption for the last 12 months. printed
with the bill every month.

[http://www.eletropaulo.com.br/portal/download.cfm?pasta_id=3...](http://www.eletropaulo.com.br/portal/download.cfm?pasta_id=317)
(page 3, item 18)

~~~
pkulak
I get a simple graph on my bill too. But this is real-time and instantaneous
measurement. There's a bit of a difference.

~~~
jodrellblank
"real-time" ish. I like the way they switch a light off, then stare at the
iPhone for a few seconds to tell them it's gone dark. ;)

Joking aside, I didn't know meters had "LED ports on them(IR?) and assumed
these sorts of devices would have to be complex and measure current somehow.

It's another place where I think "great, but I don't want it streaming to the
cloud, can't I host it myself?". Follow up thought: I'll be much more willing
to host things myself for internal use when SSDs are common enough to mean
small computers can be completely silent.

~~~
wesley
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.

~~~
jodrellblank
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.

~~~
tomharrisonjr
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 of us who live in cold places tend to
heat with natural gas and oil -- in my house our electricity use is only 20%
of our total energy use (kWh of electricity compared to kWh of gas).

In other words, this market may be like the fax machine, which was made
obsolete by the Internet almost before it was introduced three decades or so
ago ... yet, they're still around :-).

~~~
electromagnetic
I still wonder why the fax machine is in such use when it offers lower
reliability than the internet, I wonder if it's for security reasons. The
worst you'll ever got through fax is either hatemail or someone photocopying
their butt and faxing you it. However, your entire system can be taken down if
you're not properly protected from receiving a single malicious email.

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.

~~~
tomharrisonjr
I guess my point on heat was that a thing that I think needs to be done with
all of these monitors is to add other kinds of household energy uses (like nat
gas, oil) to the electrical data already being captured.

Natural gas is usually delivered in units of energy called "therms", oil is
delivered by the gallon (or litre), and electricity is delivered by the kWh --
all of these measures of energy can be converted into kWh so could be
displayed together in a single display.

