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Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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