TED 5000 Household Power Meter (photo: The Energy Detective)
It’s no secret that cutting your household energy consumption is a great way to reduce your environmental footprint. It’s also a great way to save money on your utility bills. But to pinpoint the best places to reduce power use, you need to know exactly where your power is going – no small task considering the number of devices, appliances, and fixtures in an average home. Enter the TED 5000 energy meter, a nifty tool to precisely track your home energy use.
The TED 5000 is the latest model from the folks at The Energy Detective, and it allows wireless real-time monitoring of energy usage. The system is compatible with Google’s PowerMeter as well as TED’s own Footprints software. Data is presented in simple graph formats, and users can track energy spikes at certain times of day or when using particular appliances.
Google PowerMeter Display (photo: The Energy Detective)
The TED 5000 can display energy usage in terms of kilowatts, dollars, or CO2 output. The system can also be programmed to factor in varying energy costs (for example, if your local power company charges different rates based on season or time of day). It can even calculate net energy use if a user supplements municipal power from the grid with their own household solar or wind power setup.
The TED 5000 is available with or without the wireless display, and the system can track data from multiple electrical panels. Prices start at $199.95 for the basic system.
For more information, visit the TED website.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
TED is a nice looking product–does anyone have personal experience using it? I have used different power data loggers that cost several thousand dollar for industrial energy efficiency projects and TED looks like a good option for home-owners. It looks like Footprints software is necessary to DIY graphing of usage history.
We’re big fans of electricity monitoring at the company I work for, EnergyCircle.com. We sell this TED as well as a number of other monitors that serve similar or different needs (and price points). Monitoring energy usage is rather incredible in terms of how it can help you identify the little and big things that use electricity in your house — knowledge of power is power!
Tom
@David Harris — yes, I have and use a TED 5000. The old version had optional software that was only accessible via a USB connection; the 5000 is a much, much smarter device indeed.
It gets its data directly from the main power lines supplying your house. It sends that data to a “gateway”. The gateway is actually a little computer on a plug: it has some storage so it can retain a good deal of data, but it also connects (with an Ethernet wire) to your home network and has an embedded web server, so you can look at the Footprints software (with all the graphing, history, exports, etc.) through your web browser … as long as you are connected to your local network.
The gateway can also accept wireless connections from the TED Display (that’s the part in the picture) — it uses ZigBee for what that’s worth.
You can import data into a spreadsheet if the graphs it has aren’t cool enough for you. And if you’re a geek, TED 5000 has an API that allows you to write a program to fetch the data the TED has stored and do with it whatever you want.
And an extra-cool feature is that it is able, with your permission, to send its data to Google PowerMeter, which is associated with your personal google account. When you’re logged in to Google, you can see your real-time (almost) readings in very nice graphs.
TED 5000 certainly breaks some new ground in several ways. But there have been some issues reported with reliability; I’m a major geek, and it took me a while to get a few things worked out … but in the end, it mostly just works.
I think for the moment, it’s the coolest game in town … although there’s certainly some potential competition nipping at its heels. I just installed a beta version of a product called WattVision — it’s still very early, but the design is far more elegant in some ways than the TED. I have written about both of these (and several others) on my personal blog at fivepercent.us and also on the website I work for, linked above on my name.
Tom
Tom, thanks for your input.
@Tom
The problem with WattVision is that it is (or will be) a subscription based service. You only have to pay for the Ted5000 once.