How much power is your home using? How to monitor that and more..
We all get an electric bill month after month; we pay it and move on with our lives. Have you ever taken a step back and thought damn, why am I paying $100, $200, $300 or more a month for electricity? What could possibly be using all that power? How do you even being to track what is being consumed?
Historically you had a very limited set of options if this question came up. You could buy a Kill A Watt and track each device one at a time. With this system though your limited to 120v appliances which more then likely are not your problem in the first place. The second option was to call your power company and have them do a home energy audit. The last option was to start guessing and unplugging appliances check how fast your meter was moving. All of these are really unpractical, have little historical or analytical tracking ability and require an active effort to make them happen. What occurs many times is people continue to live with their electric bill and the ignorance of what and how much power they really are using.
Technology thankfully has now matured where there is more then one whole home energy monitoring solution on the market, and countless smart plugs that can give you real time and long term data insight regarding your homes consumption. In the whole home engery monitoring market there are 2 products I am actively aware of.
Sense attempts to understand what is utilizing power by viewing a devices unique signature . Once two CT (Current Transformers) are installed on the mains of your home circuit panel, they are connected to the hub which reports the data for analysis. I have talked to a few people who own the Sense device and overall it does a fair job. The main issues come about when Sense cannot detect what is using the power. This can leave you with a large 'Unknown' bubble. One thing I thought was pretty great was the Sense Saves section on their site. You should check it out this illustrates the real advantage to being clued into your homes energy usage.
