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...