This is a great way to bring the "Prius Effect" into your house... you can totally geek out, annoy your children, and alienate your spouse by watching a graph of your energy consumption while pointing at the culprit disapprovingly.
Or perhaps, you could put an "Energy Jar" in the center of the living room where you can collect funds for your next trip to Disneyland or start that fund to buy everyone extra sweaters and blankets as you crank down the thermostat during the winter.
The basic utility of the device is to show you when energy is getting used and potentially identify areas to improve. If you see something happening at 3AM every night, but everyone's asleep and it's winter, perhaps your irrigation system is still running (even though the water is turned off).
A tip: anything with an "analog" clock or timer is chewing up energy. My front-loading washer eats energy while doing nothing (there may be a solenoid holding a door lock open). My microwave eats almost as much energy as my laptop just telling me the time. How you "solve" those problems will definitely depend on how popular you'd like to be in your house.
Depending on your energy "rate structure", you may be able to identify ways to stay out of certain "zones" where things cost more. I live in a place with "Tiered" rates. When you exceed one level, the price per kWhr goes up. So, peak use doesn't matter as much as reducing the "base load" of the house.
I was able to identify a hundred watts of power vampires (and maybe more) in surprising locations, and verify their effect with this setup. By turning those things off, I might stay out of the next higher energy rate tier. If you live in a "time of use" rate area, you might use the data differently.
The point is - with this setup, your data is WAY BETTER than the power company's data - in that, you can see it every few seconds and it's pretty accurate. But, I wouldn't try arguing your bill with it...
This unit works with both the Black and Decker (Black & Decker EM100B Energy Saver Series Power Monitor) and BlueLine Power Cost Monitor sensors.
Note that this unit is also now compatible with Google PowerMeter, but I still prefer Microsoft Hohm. You can't seem to use both at once.
Also, and this is important, this unit absolutely REQUIRES 802.11b wireless support on your router. Some new routers do NOT support "Mixed Mode" (e.g. 802.11b/g, a/b/g, b/g/n etc.) connection. If yours does not, you will be stuck using 802.11b for your network.
The setup was fairly straightforward. When I installed the software, it found a new version of the firmware for the unit and installed it without issue.
One thing to note is that the instructions tell you to "Hold the Reset button until the light stays RED" on the unit in order to get it to pair with your sensor that's out on the power meter.
Don't do that. If you hold the reset button too long, it will erase all the programming you just did on it.
It appears to me that the unit is ready to pair as soon as you disconnect it from the computer and move it to where you'll be "installing" it (near the power meter). The light blinks red and amber at that point. Pressing the reset button didn't change the blinking pattern, and pressing the button on the sensor outside on the power meter immediately paired the WiFi device to the power meter sensor.
One thing to note is that this unit has a very informative web page inside it. It will tell you things about the current link status of your connection to Microsoft Hohm or Google Power Meter, the battery level in your power meter sensor, and the signal strength of that connection.
The device's web page also automatically refreshes the data more quickly than the Hohm site. But it will ONLY SHOW YOU DATA IF YOU USE A SECURE WIFI NETWORK. They warn you about this in the package. But it's just a helpful reminder in case you don't use at least WEP security. Some people scratch their heads when they see a blank page, but Hohm has their data somehow.
I chose to assign the device a FIXED IP address on my router so that I could always get to that web page. If you use DHCP, the Hohm connection will be fine, but your device might drift around your network when your router resets itself. You can fix a DHCP address in your router or in the device setup. Doing it in the router may require re-doing the device setup just because of how your router behaves, so I'd recommend doing it in the device setup.
The device seemed to survive a power outage, and Hohm reconnected as soon as the power came back on.
So, now that you can see all your data, go out and hunt for power vampires! Blue Line Innovations BLI 31100 PowerCost Monitor WiFi Gateway
It does the job, but can sure be annoying to get configured. The fact that it is only 802.11b and flakey with some newer routers is also a pain - but I've managed to make it work with my gear (mostly). I found going with a static IP setup to be the best route. I think overall it's probably about $50 overpriced. - Energy - Energy-saving Devices - Electric Consumption - Microsoft'
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