Most people don’t bother keeping track of their electricity meter. You can get a rough idea of how much power you are using by how fast it is spinning, but that is not going to give you any accurate idea about how much you are going to pay each month or quarter (depending on where you live). That is why I think the Energy Detective makes a lot of sense. It tracks your electricity consumption and displays the amount that you have consumed in kilowatts or dollars.
While a skilled techie could probably manage installing the Energy Detective, it is probably better that you leave it in the hands of an electrician. A transmitter needs to be installed inside your mains box. Messing around with live wires is not a good idea unless you know exactly what to do. Once the transmitter is installed, you plug the display unit into any power point in the house in order to receive live updates regarding your electricity consumption. It seems pretty cool if you are not sure how much electricity you actually use. The other thing that you can do with it is to set up alarms, so that it will alert you whenever your usage goes over a predetermined point.
Price: $169.95 for the regular model or $209.95 for 400 Amp model. You can beef up your system with additional display units for $57.00 apiece.
via Pop Gadget
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Tags: electricity, Technology
2 responses
Mar 22, 2008 at 11:16 am
Don’t get one of these if you live in Queens or Brooklyn New York, Anywhere that uses the delta system of power distribution. That’s where you have 120v on each leg but only 208 total. If you do have this type of system your TED will read about 1/5 of what it should.
TED knows about this and has not responded.
Mar 3, 2009 at 12:57 pm
It’s not under $200.00. In your article you said you paid an additional $40.00 to “unlock” the data port. I think this is ridiculous. I’m looking at competitive solutions where there’s no “up-charge” to access the data monitored by the unit.
I would pay an additional $40.00 for ethernet–the ability to plug the unit into my lan. I wouldn’t ever consider paying additional to “unlock” a data port that is provided with the device.
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