Tom has a new crush. It's called the WattVision Energy Monitor. | Hacker News Reader

Tom has a new crush. It's called the WattVision Energy Monitor.

energycircle.com

62 pointspg51 comments

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.

It might make more sense in e.g. European markets where electricity costs 3x as much per kW/h.

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.

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?

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.

It seems that only industrial power users have a serious need for power monitoring. Various people talk about how the home market is the holy grail, but most home-owners simply don't use enough power and they think they have a good idea where it is going.

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.

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..

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.

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"?

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

Does the CurrentCost unit have to be attached at the meter or can it be hooked up to the breaker box?

Quote:

"Take the transmitter and its sensor jaw to your mains meter; select the thick round wire from the meter that leads to your house. Ensure there is room around the wire for the jaw to encircle the wire and put the clamp around the wire."

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

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.

http://gridspy.co.nz/

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

Yay Savraj!

He is getting some serious PR. A class act.

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?

You can, depends on your power company.

You're only out of luck if you want a detailed history or to view it on the web, plenty of monitoring devices exist that are compatible with the analog models. http://blackanddecker.com/Energy/PowerMonitor.aspx?WT.mc_id=...

The BlueLine PowerCost monitor (same as the Black and Decker version) both have sensors that, in addition to reading digital meters, can read the black line on the analog meters. There's no reason that WattVision couldn't do exactly the same thing. It's primitive, to be sure, but it works.

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

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.

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

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.

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... (page 3, item 18)

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

"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.

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.

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 :-).

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.

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.

One advantage is that the storage and processing of your power usage is centralised in one place, benefiting from economies of scale. If you had that storage and processing power in the meter itself the meter would cost more and use more power - while not using the advanced functionality most of the day.

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 agree with gridspy, and would add that the WattVision solution is considerably simpler than others: fewer wires, fewer connections, fewer components than (for example) the TED 5000, which I also have.

There is a led on the side of many meters that flashes faster as you use more power. Usually it flashes 3600 times for every kWh, so if you have a small bar heater on (1 kw Load) it will flash once per second.

Watt vision counts these pulses. While keeping it simple, it does mean that WattVision is at the mercy of an existing meter to work.

In the UK you can get this from your supplier. They send you out a little unit that shows your current usage, cost etc etc.

I think the device is called "Alert Me", or perhaps they are using The Owl or the CurrentCost.

I got the same graph on my bill. It was helpful. But when I turn on a light, the graph updates in a few seconds. It's brilliant (but then, well, I have a crush on it, according to energycircle.com)

> graph of your consumption for the last 12 months

Monthly graphs would be somewhat helpful. For example, you could decipher that the AC uses a lot of power if the graph spikes in summer.

Daily graphs would be way more helpful. For example, you can see how much you saved on a day where you were out and used no power.

Hourly graphs would be still more helpful. If you knew you watched TV from 8-9, you could see the cost of an hour of TV.

Real time graphs are the ultimate. Not only do you get all the benefits of the above graphs, but you can go around your house flipping switches and see exactly how much each appliance costs to run. You can spend an hour messing around and reduce your power bill significantly--a savings which you'll realize every month.

I don't need this device to tell me that standby devices waste power. Just install some power strips and turn it off completely.

I don't see much other use for a device like this if you've already eliminated standby devices. Sure, it can tell you that your fridge is wasting alot of electricity, but that's what the energy labels are for (A++ etc)

If you're already very energy-conscious, I can see your point. However, most people probably don't think about how much power their standby (and operational, but unnecessary) devices consume.

An analogy: I don't need Mint to tell me I waste money. Of course, I try to minimize the amount of money that I waste, but some is inevitably spend on stupid things. However, Mint is a tool that helps me identify exactly when and where I'm wasting the most money, which informs the financial decisions I make.

Well, I don't think those people would even buy such a device. Only people that are aware of their energy usage and actively want to reduce it would want a device like this.

Of course if they got a deal with an energy supplier and got this installed for free in all houses it'd be a different matter entirely.

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 units. It can help you find out when the lights are on and they shouldn't be. It can tell you that there are a lot of standby loads being left on overnight.

If you have a typical house and a huge power bill, you might not know which of many complex loads is using the most power. Perhaps it is standby devices. Perhaps it is lighting in the kitchen. Perhaps the fridge is leaking and turning on more often than it should. Maybe it is the hot water. Once you have localised the problem, you can make a smart investment to save power.

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..

While I too have doubts about WattVision's monthly subscription model, I can assure you that an energy monitor has surprised most of the people I know who also have them -- they become ingrained into your life.

Power monitoring can still be useful to help prevent you from slipping back to inefficient usage.

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.

That's what I thought too. I am very energy conscious. But I have been monitoring electricity for several years now, and I am still finding things that I can change. Often I find that my kids have left on the electric heat in the basement. I recently learned that I can do one dryer load with two loads of laundry and it takes only a bit more power.

I assumed there was no way I could use less electricity. I was completely wrong. Think of it more like a thermometer or a clock.

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