The Energy Detective is a kit that you can purchase online that lets people monitor how much power their house is using in real-time.  While there are newer kits that work with your power meter, many advanced power meters (such as what I have) won’t work with them.

The way TED works is as follows:

The measuring “donuts” hook up inside your electrical panel. These donuts then are connected (and powered) by one of the breakers. The electrical line connected to the breaker is used to send a signal to a remote “gateway” that can then be connected to your router.

Hooking this up is, unfortunately, non-trivial if you’re non-technical, especially if you’re not familiar with electrical equipment or have an electrician at your beck and call.

My Installation

My house has 4 different panels so I used their highest end model that came with 4 sets of “donuts” that connect to their MTU (the gadget that records the data and sends it out to the gateway.

Now, the documentation for TED (and the help forums) assume that the people doing this sort of thing can, on the one hand, afford a $500 gadget to measure their power output but on the other hand assumes the user is going to be unable or unwilling to spend a relatively small amount to make it easy to hook up.  As a result, there are a lot of aggravated users on the TED forums.

The main reason: The power line communications choice that TED uses.  Basically, TED sends its signal from its MTU to its gateway over your power line. This makes it very vulnerable to electrical interference and weak signals.  Even if you overcome this, odds are, it by itself will interfere with other gadgets are that using the power lines to communicate as well (security systems and other smart home features).

I decided to bypass this pain by spending an additional $100 on two things:

1) An additional circuit breaker + power outlet dedicated just to this.

2) Netgear WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet Adapter

These two things bypassed many many pages of frustration you’d get under normal circumstances.

The first is so that you have a clean line from your donuts/MTUs directly to the Gateway.  The second is to make it easy to get the Gateway data to my wireless router.

This is the Netgear Ethernet to Wireless adapter which I hooked up to the TED gateway.

This is my crappy setup. I’ll clean it up later once I’m satisfied it’s working.  Basically, all 4 donuts/MTUs output to a single line that goes to the outlet that the gateway is plugged into. By doing this, I bypass all the line noise nonsense/interference with my security system that I’d get if I tried to have it use a regular outlet. I had an electrician come over and install the outlet I needed.

This is my breaker box after I unscrewed the cover that hides the spaghetti. So those two donuts go around the black and red lines and are connected to the TED “MTU” (measuring gadget) that is then powered/connected to one of my breakers which is fed to a dedicated power outlet.

TED also has a decent real-time measuring system that you can see below.

Now, I picked this up because I was trying to figure out why my house is using so much electricity.  The big yellow jump there is the geothermal turning on that heats our pool room.  The blue line is the total amount.  The light blue line are the lights, control 4 and home automation controls. The pink is something I’m still investigating but mostly has to do with our kitchen (my wife was making dinner in our electrical stove during this).  The green I’m still trying to figure out what’s using that.

Verdict

If you’re pretty technical and not afraid of of messing with your electrical system a bit, TED is a good choice. I will admit that my casual/careless nature (you saw the picture above) meant I experienced a few shocks. You need to be careful when doing this kind of thing – more careful than I am.

If you can use a system that works with your electrical meter outside your house, I’d recommend that.  But for the large % of people who, like me, cannot do that then TED is really your only option.