greenTECHZONE Products for the week of October 16, 2006

Blue Line Innovation's PowerCost Monitor Helps Consumers Take Charge Of their Electricity Bills

As unobtrusive as a small electric clock, the PowerCost Monitor is a powerful real-time direct feedback display device for domestic energy consumers. It tells them at a glance, in real-time, how much electricity their home is using in dollars and cents and in kW.

Domestic energy use studies have demonstrated that real-time feedback yields energy savings anywhere between 10 and 20 percent. The savings at the high end of this range are realized when a tabletop energy display device, such as the PowerCost Monitor, is used.

The PowerCost Monitor technology consists of two discrete functional units:

1. A detection unit, known as the transmitter, is affixed to an existing household electromechanical utility meter with a simple ring clamp. This transmitter tracks the energy consumed by counting turns of the meter disk. This is the only component of the PowerCost Monitor that will be in direct physical contact with the utility's electromechanical meter and the clamp mechanism allows it to be attached to the outside of the meter glass. It can also be quickly attached and detached without making any changes to the existing meter.
2. The display unit, located inside the home, receives a wireless signal from the transmitter and displays the consumption information in real time and in dollars and cents for the end user. Other information is also displayed such as time and outside temperature.
   

analogZONE Says...

I'm not much of a gadget freak and tend to avoid cluttering up my life with the widgets you see in the Sharper Image catalog but, when I saw the PowerCost energy monitor, I was intrigued. Now, after having run it in my house for a bit over a week, I've become addicted to knowing how much electricity my house is chewing up on a minute-by minute basis. I know not everyone will find the same fascination in watching their appliances cycle, but most people will appreciate how well this simple little meter lets you identify the energy hogs and quiet electricity leaks in your home or office.

The system determines how much electricity your house is using by looking at how fast the little mechanical wheel in your electric meter is spinning. This is done using a non-intrusive detection unit that clamps onto the meter and uses a pulsed infrared (I think) emitter and a small detector array to sense the disk's motion. The detector transmits its measurements (plus the outside temperature) across a low-power wireless link to a nice-looking little LCD display which can be placed 60 - 100 feet (depending on the construction of your home) from the sender. Once the display is programmed, you can see how many kW-hr you're using, how much per hour it's costing you, a running total of the power you've consumed and the outside temperature.

It took me a little over a half-hour to set the entire unit up, including attaching the detection unit to the power meter. The only two slightly challenging parts were aligning the sensor array to read the power meter's disk and programming the display unit with the right rate data (have your last electric bill ready) to allow it to give you an accurate cost readout. Since the display is also battery-powered, it was easy to hang it up over the house's smart thermostat so I now have a single place where I can observe my home's operation.

Because the PowerCost only looks at the total amount of electricity your house is using, you can only infer exactly what device is using how much power. But after a few days, it's easy to get a feel for what the baseline power level is for a given time of day and which appliance or piece of equipment has come on to bump it up. The experience of watching how the house power consumption varies over the day has been quite educational for me. For example, I learned that when I'm here in my home office with most of the rest of the house dark and quiet, I still see around 0.7 kW-hr (around 10.5 cents/hr at our normal billing rate) worth of juice being used, with short spikes of 1.0 - 1.2 kW-hr up as the refrigerator, freezer, and dehumidifier kick on and off. When the rest of the family descends on me around 5:30 more lights, computers, TVs, and other stuff goes on and our baseline hovers at around 0.9 - 1.1 kW-hr (14 - 18 cents/hr) until bed time.

But as much as I like the unit the way it is, there is at least one improvement that would make a second-generation system much more useful. Since the power meter data is already transmitted wirelessly, it's a shame that I couldn't buy a second receiver that could be attached to your PC, perhaps via a USB interface. That way, I could have a little pop-up dashboard on my screen which could also show timelines, trends and other ways to look at how my house uses its power. It would be even cooler if you could export the data to an Excel spreadsheet, database or other program of your choice.

But even if it's not PC-friendly, the PowerCost meter is one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-that products which should appeal to the ecology-minded and the budget-conscious consumer alike. After only a few days, it's changed the way I look at my home's energy consumption. While all the meter does is let me know how much power I'm using, it's a really useful conservation tool because it helps me pinpoint where all the juice is going. Now that I'm aware of the fact that my house draws nearly 700 W-hr in its idle mode, I've got the motivation to start hunting down all the unnecessary loads that are adding dollars to my bill, tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere.

The PowerCost energy monitor is available now, priced at $149 retail.

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