Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcb | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

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)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com