Comments on: Different Ways To Measure Electricity Use: Which is Right for You?

By: nathan

nathan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:39:03 +0000

the nice thing about going the open source route is that I can try to implement a feature missing from all of the energy monitors. When you look at your data and graphs you start to wonder what devices were causing the load at a certain point. Eventually you start to make note of the hogs, oven, fridge, etc. As you get a feel for you it you can quickly see in the graph when the big items are on. So why can the software do this for you? It could, actually. If you know the living room lamp takes 12-14 watts then if you annotate this in your data once the software could track whenever there is a total increase or decrease by this amount and tell you when the lamp was turned on, left on, turned off. Do this for all your known devices and you will a clear picture of what was on, even when looking at data a month old. The other nice part of this is that you could tie this information into a site like www.wattzon.com/stuff and create more accurate profiles for electrical items. You can also track degradation of efficiency for items over time, compare the efficiency of your items to others, etc.

By: nathan

nathan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:16:37 +0000

Hi tom, the OWL looks great. They do have a model for worldwide distribution. So it will work in the EU, and perhaps the US as well. It is rather cheap too, around 60€ to 70€. They say on their website they can only ship the USB data monitor inside the UK so I've asked them if there is another way to get data logging with the international model.In addition, wikipedia links to a couple that will work in the EU. The most sexy of them is the Wattson which goes for 150€. It also features long term logging like TED or OWL. See this video (in dutch but pretty self explanatory) or www.wattsonholmes.eu . yqRftsI&feature=player_embeddedThere is also the Eco-Eye which I found sold here in Germany for 100€ (and other places in the EU)But, the option I'm probably going to use is the Flukso open source monitor. This is basically a microcontroller plus an open router, I think. All of the source files for fabricating a board are available. I took a look at the source and it is actually using some Arduino libraries so I imagine this can all be built using the super-simple arduino prototyping platform. It also supports data logging. Did I mention its all open source :)

By: Why is Copenhagen important? | Song for Jasmine

Why is Copenhagen important? | Song for Jasmine — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:16:38 +0000

[...] easy as small changes in lifestyle, neither expensive nor difficult. It’s quite possible to reduce your electricity use by half, for example. Solving global warming is more a political problem than a technical one, persuading [...]

By: Tom Harrison

Tom Harrison — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:35:25 +0000

Nathan — you may want to inquire about The Owl (http://www.theowl.com) which is made for sale in the UK. I believe the Cent-a-meter is sold for use in Austrailia. I am not sure if either will work in Germany, although it looks as though the display configuration supports multiple currencies — a good sign :-)

UK line voltages and frequency are the same as Germany (230V/50Hz), but I am not clear on how many phases (separate wires) come into the house to deliver the power. The other minor issue is the plug configuration for the part that powers the display — you might need an adapter for that.

As far as the Kill-a-watt goes, I found one site claiming that you could use a voltage converter to reduce the output to the 110V supported by the North American standard.

Please write another comment if you find any useful information about support for these items in Germany or other countries.

By: nathan

nathan — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:38:16 +0000

Hi, do you know of devices like TED and Kill-a-watt that work well in the EU… Germany in particular? I’ve been following your site and it is nice to have one post that kinda summarizes some of the steps you’ve made.