"I'll Believe It When I See It."
When we decided to post our electricity monitoring data on the internet, it was our hope, among other things, that this small gesture might prompt others to monitor their own electricity use and discover some of the straight-forward ways to reduce it, as we did. We've been monitoring for months, so we frankly didn't expect to be stunned by the data. We were wrong.
We have a pretty standard house. No solar panels, no windmills in the back yard. That said, we're attentive to our energy use. We've had a professional energy audit, changed out most of the incandescent bulbs in our house, and use power strips to reduce vampire energy. And since putting our whole-house electricity monitor, TED, The Energy Detective, on our kitchen counter, we've reduced our electricity use by about 15%.
All that's changed now is that our energy use, courtesy of a TED retrofit and Google Visualization API, is on the Internet. Nevertheless, the past 48 hours of live-streaming to the Internet have been full of surprises.
First, because our project generated a lot of press excitement, including television interviews in our kitchen. Second, because actually seeing our usage got me excited to learn more about why, when, and how much our usage was spiking.
The Dryer gives .... 200%! on Low.
We weren't surprised to see spikes when we made toast, used the microwave, or turned on the dryer. But when I noticed that the dryer caused a huge spike on the graph, I wondered how much settings mattered. Here's what I found out. Our reading was 1.40KW when I turned the dryer on. At first, I ran a twenty minute cycle with no heat. Immediately, the TED spiked to 2.30KW, and remained at that level for 20 minutes, then went back to 1.40KW. When I turned the dryer to low heat (low!) TED spiked to 8.44KW. It eventually dropped down to 4.55KW and stayed there for the duration of the cycle. In other words, our Killowatt rate increased by 200% when the dryer was on low!
We expected the dryer to be a big hog, just not that big. And now, I'm on a tear. I noticed this morning that my halogen bulbs cause the monitor to spike an entire point. That's one light! So guess what? I'm going to go mess with lights.
I'll let you know what I find out.
Comments
The TED is an awesome tool. I installed one a few months back but eventually had to return it because I'm waiting for the TED 5000 to be unveiled. The problem with the current TED model is that it doesn't have internal memory. This means that in order to log data while you sleep (which should be a third of the time you're recording data) you have to have a computer turned on, which kinda defeats the whole energy conservation purpose!
Posted by ckmapawatt on Apr 30, 2009 6:32pmWith that said, the product is very well made and worked perfectly. Their customer support was top notch and I would highly recommend it.
More can be found here on my review of the product:
http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/02/27/the-energy-detective/
Sorry if I've missed it somewhere on the site. Have you released the source code for the TED streaming yet?
Posted by wembley on May 7, 2009 1:06pmThanks.
Great stuff!!! Been using TED myself for over a year now. Would really love to see and or get access to your software the does this. Would that be possible? Thanks in advance.
Posted by Todd Headlee on May 23, 2009 3:00pm