Amazing how much you can find out about your appliances with this. I had no idea my chandelier was burning 300 Watts 8 hours a day; that makes it worth going to LED bulbs. I can see the 6KW my air conditioner takes when it kicks in, so I'm using fans when the outside temp drops below the inside temp -- and my lovely wife understands!! A home water cooler was burning 60 Watts night and day, now it's on a remotely controlled power strip. I also found out that putting a non-dimmable CFL on a dimmer ages it quickly, and can make them take up to 3x their rated power before they burn out. Graphing the realtime output takes external software and my favorite one ( at [...]) takes linux, bash, networking and perl skills to get to working, but you don't need any of that to start finding out what influences your electric bill. Home Energy Saving Monitor ENVI-CC128 Complete Unit with Transmitter
The Envi was easy to set up.
It works well - understand it calculates your usage using the current that the CT Clamps are measuring so it is not 100% accurate - My calculations have it within about 3-5 % however which is close enough to get a idea of what you are using and wasting energy on.
Google Power Meter is OK - it is not the best however.
Do a GOOGLE search for VSPE Virtual Serial Port Emulator. This will let let you clone the output so that you can use more than one piece of tracking software.
I use Google Power Meter and the ENVI Techtoniq Monitor. Both use less than 3% of my CPU on an ATOM Based NetTop.
The Techtoniq software has better graphs. I am still trying out others but so far it looks like it is just about the best.
Later and Good Luck.
The product allows us to see our energy usage continuously. We can tell when electrical applications are running or when lights are on without having to walk through the house to check everything. Having this product has made us very aware of the many ways we had been wasting energy, and so now we've started turning things off and using electricity at cheaper times of the day. We've already cut our usage and our energy bill.
- Great product and fairly easy to install. I'm assuming the watts measurement is accurate but I don't have any way to verify that. I purchased the device to monitor watts, Not for its ability to calculate costs so I can't comment on that, the dollars and cents don't really mean much to me. I'm interested in power consumption, So I Love the precision of this device, it measures down to the watt if consumption is under 1000 watts, down to 10 watts if consumption is over 1000 watts.
- I tried one of the Blue Line Power Cost monitors before I bought this one, if you are also considering the Blue Line I would suggest Not. The blue-line only measures down to the 100 watt level so thats basically useless in my opinion, many devices draw less that 100 watts so the blue-line won't give any useful data on them. I also found the blue-line to be considerably inaccurate. I compared the reading on the blue-line to manually reading the meter over a 2 week period, and the blue-line was off by over 25%.
- Anyways, in the end I highly recommend this ENVI-CC128 Home Energy Monitor.
The box contains the display unit with power cord, two clamp-on style current transformers (CT), one transmitter and product manual. I sync'd the receiver with the transmitter per the instructions and the unit worked immediately. I opened up my breaker panel in the garage and connected the the CT's to the each of the 120v lines coming to the panel and sat the transmitter in the bottom of the panel while I went inside to ensure that I still had a good connection; I did. I replaced the panel on the breaker box and still had good communication. The manual states that the signal would be good up to 100 ft and that you should take off 10' for every wall that is between the transmitter and the display unit. My transmitter and display are about 20 ft apart on a straight line distance and separated by about three walls (hard to tell since it goes through the garage wall and hits the corner of a bedroom and the kitchen and there are applicance in between.) The entire hook-up took approximately 15 minutes. I don't know how accurate the unit is since I don't have anything to compare against except the meter outside. My power company charges different rates for different levels of KW usage, so I calcualted my average KWh rate from last months bill and put that into the unit. I knew that my AC compressor was a large load, but did not realize just how large it was. Another item that is an energy hog is the electic oven; I was shocked at just how much power it actually used. I have only had the unit for half a day, but so far it is working fine and I have something that allows me to monitor my power usage.
Another good feature about this unit is that you can monitor up to ten different loads on one display unit if you purchase separate transmitter/CT assembly. This would allow you to monitor your whole house usage and ten different single loads such as your AC unit, water heater, dryer, etc...) The problem would be finding enough room in your breaker panel to put all of the transmitters. I could probably squeeze in one more transmitte but doubt I'll do it.
So far, I am very pleased with the purchase based on price, working immediately and ease of use. - Energy Savings - Energy Monitor - Power Meter - Conservation'
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