Morning all.
For years I have been wishing somebody would come up with a way to easily monitor the real time consumption and cost of electricity at any time during our daily activities. Reading EC&M magazine, I see the TED 5000! After reading the web info and several blogs,I love the idea. The equipment looks good (aesthetics you know),but the blogs give a very uncomfortable feeling about reliability and customer support. Does anyone have any experience with this unit or any other similar unit. At $250 ea. I am sure I could sell and install a bunch, but a return visit would take away all the profit. Here's a link.
http://www.theenergydetective.com/ted-5000-overview.htmlThanks,
Dave
NHSparky:
First that I saw this, and thanks for the link. I have not cracked the cover on ECM and EC mag this month yet. Time permitting, I'll look into this further.
Based on your comments from the blogs, reliability is a key issue & call backs are something to avoid. I remember the first Emon installs years back that required quite a few callbacks for mfg issues, not the installs. That mfg stood behind the product & paid the callback costs.
Energy monitors are being promoted in UK, with some supply companies "giving" them as part of a marketing agreement. See ://www.theowl.com/ They seem to cost under £50, as configured for UK single phase.
Apparently, we in the UK will all have these fitted by 2020! The government has declared we are all getting "smart meters". I was chatting to a utility guy last week and he tells me these are two way devices. The power company can also monitor your usage of power, when you use most and to some extent what you are using too!!! He also said, if they suspect fraud, or there is non-payment, they can cut the power remotely too. To me, this is all getting a bit too much "big brother" - what do you guys in the US think?
We are getting the same thing here soon. I like the idea that they can reduce costs by taking readings remotely, but I am not crazy about the remote disconnect capability. I can see that being a huge problem if a glitch causes it to cut out. I live in an area where they don't read the meter every month; more like every quarter. I'll be glad to receive billing for actual usage rather than estimates. Still, I don't like the "big brother" aspect of it at all.
The pocos in the UK need a court order to cut off senior citizens and other vulnerable folk. One hopes they get their records correct before cutting someone at risk off.
And you may not be aware, but pocos in the UK will not supply electricity on a standard meter tariff to folks in Housing Association homes. They have to use coin or token meters, paying up-front at inflated prices.
Many utilities are switching to smart meters; the co-op my parents use have had them for about 2 years now. PGE is in the process of converting them; quite a task for a service area of around a million-plus customers. I don't have mine yet, but got notice that they'll be putting it in some time in the next couple of weeks. A friend of mine out in Molalla has already had two; shortly after changing his neighborhood over, there was a 75kV-14kV short that fried nearly all of them.
Check out Google Powermeter for an example of what they can do; only some utilities are participating in Google's program right now but I would expect more to come online soon.