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Published on February 7th, 2011 | by Alicia

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Geek Out With The Power Cost Monitor + WiFi

Mon­i­tor­ing your home elec­tric­i­ty us­age is wise from both an eco­nom­i­cal and en­vi­ron­men­tal stand­point. Blue Line In­no­va­tions’ Pow­er Cost Mon­i­tor, an at­trac­tive and small home en­er­gy mon­i­tor that re­sem­bles a dig­i­tal clock, promis­es re­al time en­er­gy us­age that can help home­own­ers re­duce their elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion by 10 to 20 per­cent. We like that the on­ly in­stal­la­tion re­quired is the at­tach­ment of a sen­sor unit via a ring clamp to the out­side of your home’s elec­tric util­i­ty me­ter.

The mon­i­tor works with stan­dard dig­i­tal and elec­trome­chan­i­cal me­ters, and the clamp can be at­tached to glass that typ­i­cal­ly sur­rounds me­ters. The sen­sor unit then trans­mits the en­er­gy us­age – in both kilo­watts and dol­lars and cents – to the mon­i­tor (en­er­gy rates must be en­tered for cost to be cal­cu­lat­ed). It al­so dis­plays the time and out­side tem­per­a­ture, and hav­ing a ther­mome­ter is cer­tain­ly a use­ful fea­ture for San Fran­cis­co liv­ing.

The mon­i­tor al­so dis­plays the high­est amount of en­er­gy used in a 24-hour pe­ri­od, which can help pin­point the times when you and yours may be wast­ing en­er­gy. The mon­i­tor re­quires a wire­less sig­nal of 433 MHz and has a range of 100 feet from the sen­sor.

We found the set up to be fair­ly easy. We called Blue Line In­no­va­tions’ cus­tomer sup­port to an­swer a few ques­tions and found them to be help­ful and po­lite. We ob­served a lag time of about 30 sec­onds be­tween a change in en­er­gy con­sump­tion and the mon­i­tor read­ing. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the unit is heav­i­ly af­fect­ed by the use of oth­er wire­less de­vices in the home and can re­sult in a dropped con­nec­tion and un­record­ed da­ta. Mov­ing the mon­i­tor clos­er the the sen­sor unit and mov­ing the oth­er wire­less de­vices fur­ther away helped with this is­sue. We’re a lit­tle con­cerned about the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of wa­ter in the seal around the sen­sor. So far so good, but on­ly time will tell.

Blue Line In­no­va­tions sells the Pow­er Cost Mon­i­tor for $109 and pro­vides a 1 year war­ran­ty, while Amazon.comof­fers the unit for $100.

Ready to take your en­er­gy mon­i­tor­ing to the next lev­el? Then the op­tion­al Pow­er Cost Mon­i­tor WiFi is for you. This bun­dle works with the Pow­er Cost Mon­i­tor or the Black and Deck­er Pow­er Mon­i­tor and al­lows you to mon­i­tor your en­er­gy us­age on­line with free ac­cess to mon­i­tor­ing and re­port­ing soft­ware Mi­crosoft Hohm. The Hohm soft­ware of­fers track­ing us­age and his­tor­i­cal track­ing, as well as tips and tricks on how to con­serve en­er­gy and mon­ey. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, a Mi­crosoft Live ac­count is re­quired to use the Hohm soft­ware, but we found it pret­ty straight­for­ward to use and ac­tu­al­ly kind of fun.

Track­ing of up to a year’s worth of da­ta can re­al­ly let you geek out. It’s up to you to de­ter­mine how much you want to an­noy your co­hab­i­tants by un­plug­ging the en­er­gy vam­pires in your house, but con­trol­ling and iden­ti­fy­ing them is easy with some of the gad­gets we re­cent­ly re­viewed. The WiFi set­up was a bit dif­fi­cult as it us­es the an­ti­quat­ed 802.11b wire­less stan­dard, which may re­quire the us­er to al­ter their ac­cess point con­fig­u­ra­tion. If noth­ing else, adding a 802.11b de­vice to your net­work could con­strain new­er de­vices run­ning on the net­work. We feel the WiFi Gate­way has some kinks to be worked out and be­cause of con­nec­tiv­i­ty is­sues, we rec­om­mend hold­ing off on pur­chas­ing this un­til an up­dat­ed mod­ule that runs on a G or N pro­to­col is re­leased. How­ev­er, if you sim­ply can­not wait, Amazon.com sells the Wi-Fi add-on for $129.

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