So after almost a year of PG&E jerking us around on billing, I read about the TED 5000 from Energy,Inc. over on Engadget when they announced their partnership with Google’s power meter. I’ve been looking for a data logger that I could save stats so I could figure out why the hell our bill was way out of whack, we are on some bills funding a small office.  The T.E.D. 5000 wasn’t the first power meter I bought.

I first picked up a Blue Line Innovations power cost monitor which is very similar to the Black and Decker power monitor. I know Rice has been happy with the B&D version so I figured I would get one and I found the Blue Line Monitor and figured I would see if it would help me get our power usage in check or at least figure out what the hell is going on. Unfortunately it didn’t want to play well with my PG&E meter, it would run for about 30 minutes and then stop reading.  Which when your trying to figure out usage is aggravating. Also it does require that you read and document the reading. So for me at least the Blue Line Power Meter was a bust.

So when Engadget had a article on Engery,Inc’s deal with google on the T.E.D. 5000 I was intrigued. I hadn’t seen or heard about the T.E.D. system before. So when I saw it was a plug-in web server that monitored power with induction clamps over the A & B phase and tracked usage down to 1 Watt in real time and then graphs and tracks month history back 2 years, I was sold. The google power meter support was just icing on the cake.

So far I’m just dialing things in and figuring out usage since I installed and powered it up after the meter read date. It’s interesting watching when things go one and off, and finally understanding how much power something uses and really what 1kWH means (1kWH = 10 100 watt lightbulbs) . I think people not understanding kWH with all the electronics that we have on how much draw is on the grid even though we think we are turning things off is what causes drain on our wallets. If you figure that you have a 1kWH draw on your meter every hour that’s 24 kWH in a day, and if that happens everyday for 30 days you have burned 720kWH’s in a month as a base line, and that’s not including any additional draw like a clothes dryer, electric stove/oven, coffee maker, etc.

I’m not saving energy to go green, I’m saving energy to save my green in my wallet.