I have been waiting patiently for more information about Google’s PowerMeter. It seems like only a few lucky Utilities (and their customers) get to use this service, but power to the consumer! There are various alternatives out there to pique your interest. The only stipulation to all of this is whether or not you have a SmartMeter. I know in Ontario, all new homes are supposed to have SmartMeters installed, and the old meters are to be updated in year or two. I myself am stuck waiting to get an upgrade.
For those of us without a Utility partnered with Google, Black & Decker makes a Power Monitor. It works by physically interfacing with your SmartMeter (outside your place) that in turns communicates with a central device. The central device is where all your informational glory gets graphed and displayed, and hopefully makes you learn more about your power usage trends. Big condo users are screwed, unless their Utility is signed up with Google’s PowerMeter or has some online customer system. It’ll be a common thing soon enough.
My local Utility offers such a system. The graphs are all sorts of awesome, however trying to interpret them is a different story. The best method I’ve seen so far is to literally turn off (almost) everything in your house. Then through viewing the graphs, you’d turn on a device and try to figure out a profile of it. Take your dryer for example. It probably has a very high energy spike hopefully allowing you to intelligently read those graphs and put two-and-two together. Once you get the picture of your energy portrait you can find areas you can improve — like not leaving your TV on all day!
The core idea here is to be a smart power user — it’s just that the tools (these graphs) aren’t exactly the most up to date. My own Utility has all sorts of information graphed out, but it’s a couple days old. It’s a bit like budgeting — you need to do it for a while to see the trends, and the big picture. Real time would make life so much easier! I expect homes will eventually have per-socket usage monitoring via wifi (or some such) that sends data to a built in power monitor station of your very own. A super thermostat! I know this idea has been around for a while. Take it a step further, and let’s get these appliances hooking in to some home-based open standard of power monitoring, and suddenly we raise the level of power usage education for the next generation. Not too far off we’ll be a kW-pinching society — or so I can dream!
In the mean time, a Latronix XPort Pro given a bit of hacking with a regular socket might make an interesting weekend project.