I just discovered your blog, and I already spent quite a lot of time going through your articles and comments.
I am indeed very interseted in your blog and I m definetely tempted to acquire the TED 5000 device.
BUT, as there is a back order of something like 6 weeks, I bite my tongue, hold my breath and try to hold my raging VISA in my pocket for few more weeks.

I have 2 questions,

My First question is:
could you recommend any book to understand and pinpoint the energy consumption in my house?

An Energy Audit charges 150 $ for an audit by depresurizing you house, then an additional 200$ for an Audit using a ThermoCamera.
I actually am in Montreal, Canada, and I am having an Energy Audit on my house by RenoClimat.
http://www.aee.gouv.qc.ca/en/my-home/renoclimat/

My second question is:
Is it worth having an Audit using a Thermo Camera?

By the way, I just bought a 2004 house last July 2009 and my electricity bill is just making me cry :)

Thanks

Thanks very much for your reply. I do software engineering for my paying job, and I am a big fan of the way G does software: fast, in little chunks, and moving forward as needed. No matter how fast or well you do things, it seems the customer always wants more, sooner.

(I used to hate that part of the business, then realized that having no one care what you do is far more painful)

We’ll all stay tuned :-)

Thanks again,

Tom

P.S. Other than friends I know who “say” they work at Google, and Matt Cutts, who says he’s an actual human, I was under the impression that Google was actually just a really sophisticated bit of software. Assuming you can pass the Turing Test, it’s nice to know real people work at Google. :-)

I work for the Google PowerMeter team and wanted to thank you for trying our product and for sharing your thoughts about the experience! First of all, we’re listening. I appreciate your enthusiasm for more features and we’re anxious to roll them out for you, too. Google PowerMeter is all about making energy data available so people can save energy and money. What you see today is just the start. We are working hard to implement many of the features you mention in your post. Stay tuned!

Niki

The summer peak is obvious (I live in the Southeastern US), but you can also see the smaller winter peak that occurs most often in January. This is because I have a forced air system, and when the gas burners ignite, a fan comes on to supply heated air to the house.

Actually despite the title, I never claimed the power company was ripping me off. If they are too high in their estimate, it’s made up for in the bill for the following month when they do come and read the meter.

As you can surmise from the graph, I have developed a pretty sophisticated regression of my monthly electric usage based on heating and cooling degree days. Still, our monthly electric usage is variable enough that I can only estimate to within about 175 kWh of the total.

I have seen these sites. I wrote about my disappointment with Microsoft’s warmed-over energy calculator. The opportunity is to have a utility bill automatically imported — it would provide a simple aggregation of an individual’s monthly data, normalized against location and other characteristics of the house and it’s occupants. But I think these calculators have failed on several counts:

• The effort to add home data is time consuming, and also asks questions that are onerous at best, requiring effort beyond what is reasonable for the average homeowner, and impossible in some cases, and then
• When I tried HOHM this summer, there was one utility whose data was importable. I added my name to a list and haven’t heard boo for three months. The recommendations I got weren’t wrong, for the most part, but in many cases didn’t see related to the data I had just spent a half-hour adding. Cost with no value.
• Granularity and immediacy are important. Yes, awareness of monthly bills is a big first step, and far more granular and immediate than what someone who just pays their utility bills might otherwise know. But monthly data leaves you with another to-do item having very non-specific objectives — what can you know other than “You used more heat” or “more electricity” than houses like yours. Why? What should I do?

I don’t mean to discount the value of home energy calculators — they can be a good reality check, but having completed at least four of them, I have not found as much information as I did this morning from the TED 5000, where I realized that when my heat comes on (which it did for the first time this year this morning) I am not only using gas for heat, but using 250W to 300W of electricity for circulator pumps, and perhaps other things as well. It makes me glad my house doesn’t need heat until the outdoor temperature is 40° at night :-)

Anyway, thanks for the links. I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, just seeing that what TED offers could easily be applied to gas and oil heat also. Another huge small step.

But the comparison to like houses is something that the Google PowerMeter widget seems to do already. But I bet more is coming along the lines you suggest.

It’s a brave new world.

Tom