TED 5000 – the Energy Detective; a first look

Electricity usage at a glance with TED5000

How much power does your house use and where are you wasting energy? I wanted to find out and so purchased TED-The Energy Detective whole house electricity monitoring system that was just released this summer.

The concept is great and when it works (and you have a lot of time on your hands) as it gives unprecedented insights into your home’s electric behavior. However the limitations become obvious right away and the name “Energy Detective” is right on – you have to be a detective to figure out what is driving the spikes in usage you see. My home is constantly having different things cycling on and off and isolating one is REALLY difficult. If it isn’t a major consumer of power and doing something to display a regular pattern, forget it. Also, you pretty much have to be looking at everything (the monitor and any devices or appliances) at the time to figure out what is going on. There are graphing and data export abilities incorporated, but since you don’t know what the home devices might have been doing at the time at best you can get indication that something interesting might have been happening.

I have found two things that I thought were really interesting. First is that your house is always using a good bit of power, even when you are asleep and most of everything is seemingly turned off. We often think about lighting as being an area that uses a lot of power (thus the push to switch to CFL bulbs and my constant habit of walking around the house turning off lights), but it really doesn’t. Things like the water heater, clothes drying, oven, and especially the heating and air conditioning dwarf the power used by lighting. We just have more control over lighting. Second is just how much power those larger appliances really use. I’ll see the monitor bouncing along at 800 watts (for the whole house) and then suddenly see it jump to over 4000 – just from ONE thing being turned on! It does make you very cognizant of using those devices (or maybe turning the heat down or finally programming that programmable thermostat), but it’s impossible to tell if they are working normally or not. I was also fortunate that I started using TED when the weather was moderate and the HVAC was turned off, which allowed better visibility to everything else in the house. Once the heating started kicking on, it became impossible to see what else was going on!

What is this pattern obvious in the middle of the night?

I did make one noteworthy discovery though. I bought my house a couple years ago and was very happy that the crawlspace was very dry. One reason for that was because the prior owner had put a portable dehumidifier down there and routed a drain line to the outside. I did turn it down so it wasn’t running constantly, but otherwise left it alone. When I first installed TED I saw a regular pattern of something coming on about 30 minutes every hour and finally tracked it down to that dehumidifier. The dry crawlspace was great, but keeping it that way was costing me probably $150/year!

But I’ve had a number of problems. The main one is that the reporting regularly becomes “locked” so for some number of hours (between 2 and 10 that I’ve seen) the graph will show the exact same usage level. The pegging of consumption reporting is obvious once you see it as otherwise the readings change constantly.

The graph regularly gets pegged at one level and stops working

According to tech support this doesn’t affect the monthly reporting, but I’m not sure I believe that. It doesn’t happen too often (a couple times a week), but it’s pretty annoying. Viewing the TED software also regularly locks up Internet Explorer. It would be nice to leave it on to regularly check for interesting occurrences (it takes a couple minutes to initially bring it up and get the graph to display). The history that is kept is limited to about 3600 entries which isn’t much. Looking at the minute view is the most useful (seconds too granular; hours not granular enough) and that gives you about 2 days of activity. You can accumulate your own data if you remember to do an export every couple days; otherwise older information is lost. I have some other issues that I haven’t resolved yet as well, primarily that the first electric bill I’ve received since installing TED was about 40% higher than what TED told me I should expect. I’ve made some installation changes since then which will hopefully resolve that.

Because I’m willing to play detective and figure out where some of my electrons are going in the house, TED is a very worthwhile gadget and will likely pay for itself in just a year or two. But the holy grail of home energy monitoring really needs to included more information about exactly where power is being used. This is important for two reasons I think. One is that in order to modify a homeowner’s behavior towards better energy conservation you need have specific recommendations. The other is that there may be improvements that could be made (replace an old appliance that is not working properly, better insulate or seal the house, etc.) which would provide worthwhile energy savings but without more detail it’s difficult to say just what is worth spending money on. Hopefully these will be future enhancements.

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