For me, this thing is awesome. Mainly because it makes me aware of what I'm doing. The footprints software can be a little buggy at times especially if you swap back and forth between views. The load profiling seems to have some issues. I manually entered load values for some devices (like the hot water heater), and when I go to the load profile page, it can correctly tell me what the current state of the hot water heater is, but it can never find any historical data for it.Some interesting things I've noticed so far... The house hums along at about 1.5 kwh of background usage. Is that a lot? Some of the things that are "always on" are:
- 1 desktop system with external drive
- 2 laptops. Even when they sleep the power supply is always plugged in.
- My electronics prototyping board
- Router, cable modem, wireless router, 2x switches, 2x powered cable splitters
- DVR, AV system, 5x TVs in standby mode, 3x DVD, Cordless phone base plus 2 charging stands
- 6 lights (4 CFL, 2 Halogen)
This seems like a LOT and I'm sure I'm not listing several things, but it's better than it was! It's taking some time to convert some of the other residents of the house to my way of thinking.
The hot water heater kicks on more than I thought it would just to keep the tank hot with no usage. It's an 80 gallon, 5500 watt tank. The energy usage sticker on the side estimates 5200 kwh per year at a cost of $440. Based on the data that I see from my TED unit, the water heater comes on about once an hour for about 4-5 min (these are estimates since the load profiling is buggy). That's 9-11kwh every day, roughly 4000kwh per year, just to keep the tank at temp. With my electricity rates, that's $400+ every year if I never use a drop.
Heating and cooling is by far the biggest use of electricity in my house.
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