tomharrisonjr

We're seeing queries using Athena against S3 fail in us-east-1

There's one alternative now at $179, I think (Envi). It's a terribly limited product, and requires a connection inside the breaker panel. Their newly release connection (to Google PowerMeter) seems "gangly" and is still in early release.

BlueLine has the non-connected version (meter connection and display) for $99. But this is only part of the equation, and they have been beating that horse for many years. The new WiFi connected device is OK, but brings the price up to parity with Wattvision, with far more components, and complexity.

I think you're right that $49 is a sweet spot in the market. Our contacts at Google (the PowerMeter folks) say this is what they are hearing. Yet meanwhile, everyone making remotely interesting products is starting at 5x that price, and at Energy Circle, we're seeing significant volume for products selling at 20x that price (eMonitor).

Wattvision seems closest to me. Their component count is low, their value prop is high, cost of sales has to be minimal, so they just need to get volume up (buy, buy, buy!) and any extraneous costs removed. They can beat the competition just on simplicity.

Tom

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.

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.

I had found some reasonably scientific research done a while back in a pilot program showing 15% reduction by otherwise passive people. I can't find the study now, so I could be full of it :-)

Actually, shifting to off-peak is a good outcome since fewer spinning reserve plants (usually the least efficient) are needed. But, as you say, not really the desired outcome.

My baseline use tends to run at about 300W. We first did obvious things like replace some of our lighting with CFL, and we got rid of an old chest freezer we didn't need. We changed behavior through learning to turn off lights when we left a room. There were some no-brainer things (my stereo apparently allows multi-room hookups, and if you have the buttons turned on, it uses several hundred watts to do nothing. I replaced a fileserver + routers with an Apple Time Capsule and saved 100+ watts. We use the dryer differently. And we installed a few BITS smart strips. The reason our savings are high is partly because I live in the Boston area, where our electricity rate is currently $0.19/kWh, I think. Bottom line was that we made a lot of little changes. I have written about most of them in my personal blog, called fivepercent.us if you're interested.

Well, I am the guy that lives at the author's house. We are saving over $100/month as a result of the reductions we have made. I agree with your general position, but there's at least a niche market out there, and growing rather fast, actually.

A digital meter doesn't have a spinning dial, it reads current a different way. It is able to transmit its readings in several forms, bnoth through a display on the front, but mainly they were designed to allow remote meter reading by the power company -- drive by, instead of having to actually look at the dials.

A smart meter is a digital meter but that can intercommunicate -- over a network -- either with the rest of the electric grid system, or even with devices inside your house.

The BlueLine PowerCost monitor (same as the Black and Decker version) both have sensors that, in addition to reading digital meters, can read the black line on the analog meters. There's no reason that WattVision couldn't do exactly the same thing. It's primitive, to be sure, but it works.

While I too have doubts about WattVision's monthly subscription model, I can assure you that an energy monitor has surprised most of the people I know who also have them -- they become ingrained into your life.

That's what I thought too. I am very energy conscious. But I have been monitoring electricity for several years now, and I am still finding things that I can change. Often I find that my kids have left on the electric heat in the basement. I recently learned that I can do one dryer load with two loads of laundry and it takes only a bit more power.

I assumed there was no way I could use less electricity. I was completely wrong. Think of it more like a thermometer or a clock.

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 think the device is called "Alert Me", or perhaps they are using The Owl or the CurrentCost.

This is a really good question. To be sure, there's a selection bias going on here, which I think explains why I have been able to reduce our household consumption by more than 50%, where in controlled studies (e.g. by utilities that have installed similar meters in their houses) observed reductions are around 15%.

But I would also say that I have done this over the course of several years, and while many reductions were ones I got with no pain or expense almost immediately, others were ones where I bought a new router, for example, that allowed me to get rid of my fileserver/router setup. I bought several BITS Smart Strips to reduce phantom load. None of these change my lifestyle in any way, but they do require some initiative.

Tom

I have tested the currentcost and it's a different thing in some ways -- WattVision has the distinct advantage of not requiring you to open the electrical box, for one, but also doesn't have a display (yet). CurrentCost is all about the monitor, similar to Owl. I think everyone is working towards some sort of online feed; TED 5000 has one that hooks to Google PowerMeter, but WattVision is a somewhat simpler and more extensible design IMHO. Honestly, I like them all -- monitoring electricity has helped me identify innumerable little ways to use less; the big picture is that I now use about 1/2 the electricity I did a few years ago.

I got the same graph on my bill. It was helpful. But when I turn on a light, the graph updates in a few seconds. It's brilliant (but then, well, I have a crush on it, according to energycircle.com)