Product Review: Wattvision Power Monitor

Price: $200.

Wattvision is the monitor to watch, in our book. The product is in limited beta release now but we have been testing on for some months now, and it works like a champ. The Wattvision it does almost everything the TED does (and more) in a far simpler way.

Wattvision does not install in your electrical box -- like the Blueline Powercost monitor it attaches to your electrical meter; currently digital meters are supported, but support for analog meters (old style, with spinning disk) is on its way. Then you string an included phone wire to the inside of the house and plug it in the Wattvision box, which you then plug it in anywhere you like. Done. No, really, that's it. When you place your order for Wattvision, you fill in the information it needs to connect to your wireless network and it comes all configured just for you (how smart is that?). Some lights on the box confirm that things are working as they should. Brilliant. My installation took about 10 minutes, most of which involved making the wire from the meter to the Wattvision box look nice.

Once installed, Wattvision can connect to your account (also created when you place your order) on their servers and start recording data. You can see live data, historical data, set alerts, and if you like, make some of your house data public in a little competition, and even tweet your data to the world! You can see your data at any moment from anywhere on the web, and they have a neat iPhone version of their website (no app to install).

And because the Wattvision is reading your meter, you get very quick readings that are as accurate as your meter (which in my case, comparing to TED, is very accurate). And when there's a change, it gives you an indication of how much. I was testing my old ceiling fan: turned it on, in a couple seconds the iPhone Wattvision graph showed more use and told me "Increased 87 watts". Nice.

Like Google PowerMeter, Wattvision stores your data for a long time on its secure servers, and has an API that can be used by other web applications (with your permission, of course), to do clever and cool things not yet imagined. The Wattvision.com site shows a lot of promise in its design and friendly implementation.

What we love about Wattvision is that it is inherently simple in its design. There's very little to go wrong, and there's a great deal of potential for ways to use the Wattvision data in the future and extend it's capabilities beyond electricity...

Our main complaint is that there's no display unit yet -- having your consumption data right there where you can see it at a glance is a really important part of energy monitoring, we think. We expect a display to be an option soon.