A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month.
You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes.
That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electricity than all my lights use for a month”.
I have an inverter and solar panels in my place (very common now in South Africa middle class homes due to unreliable electricity producer) and I can see a full history of electricity usage.
It’s easy for me to see where I can improve my efficiency or why my consumption was so high.
It’s still only an overall figure though, so you have to do an informed assumption as to what caused the consumption.
For example it’s obvious that the 3kw draw for about an hour or so after I shower is the geyser heating itself back up. I can see from the usage stats that my battery was depleted from the night, that the solar production is still low due to my showering in the early morning and that the energy was thus coming from the grid (the inverter records all these figures).
It is then obvious that I can very simply save money on electricity by putting a timer on my geyser so that it only heats after 10am or so, once the sun is high enough for solar production to cover the energy usage.
Now I just wish I had something as convenient for monitoring water consumption.
This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.)
My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energy use.
https://www.edfenergy.com/smart-meters/using-a-smart-meter/c...
The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point.
Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.
It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.
I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same.
(At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)
the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers
Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't.
If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.
I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them.
Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world.
Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid.
Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.
Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.
The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen thingy also uses the 'HAN'.
However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage. If that was all that was needed, there are much cheaper options designed for consumer self-install. Why did they go for the much more expensive and inconvenient smart meter+gprs option, if not to enable time-of-use tariffs?
Is that in the UK or somewhere else?
Of course - but I contest OP's claim that it has enough granularity to tell you that you're showering too much or that your tool shed uses too much energy - it doesn't allow that in the slightest.
In the UK, yes.
You can see a UK smart meter being taken apart here [1] with the GPRS module shown at around the 2 minute mark. And you can look at meter datasheets [2] which list GPRS WAN as a feature.
Smart meters often send a reading every 30 minutes. Some energy companies will then show a breakdown on their website that purports to show how much you're spending on lighting, fridges, appliances and things like that [3].
I suspect they use a lot of guesswork to arrive at that breakdown, given the limited input data. Although it's probably fairly easy to recognise certain multi-hour-and-distinctively-large loads, like EV charging and heat pumps.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G32NYQpvy8Q [2] https://www.securemeters.com/sea/wp-content/uploads/sites/15... [3] https://imgur.com/a/L0xwWEo
Where? In France the devices, called Linky and manufactured to a common standard by a few different companies, and mandatory, communicate via the grid itself over the CPL protocol. There are no SIM cards inside, and thankfully, lunatics have been suing to refuse to get their meter upgraded to Linky "BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS" bullshit which doesn't have any basis in reality.
I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses.
Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.
I worked at an energy supplier. I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data!
I don't know if it's hilarious, more like unhelpful at best, rude at worst .
It wasn't "live" data though, was it? Just a breakdown of usage per-minute, but uploaded in batches, right? And which energy supplier was that? Because with Octopus you can only get live data by installing an extra(and optional) device called Octopus mini, their SMET2 meters have no such capability.
That’s not quite right. All new smart meters have the ability to report electricity usage minute-by-minute.
You _currently_ have the choice to only report month-by-month, by kindly asking them to only do that. However, I agree with verisimi, and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before the government via energy suppliers can monitor your real time electricity usage.
It’ll be dressed up, of course, as being in your best interest, but you won’t have a choice. Smart meters were sold as being beneficial for customers, but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.
At the most basic level this is a history of when you are at home or not.
What kind of power did you have before the introduction of smart meters, exactly?
I am very conflicted. Deeply share your concerns regarding misuse of such info. It will be used as a weapon. But I am totally in favour of making wasters pay up, and not just fixed amounts.
I hate wasting resources.
"Waster" isn't really a coherent concept when taken outside of an individual's value system. What might be waste for one person might simply be a sensible use of resources for another.
Doing for a drive to the countryside for a walk? Having a long and relaxing bath? Go-karting? Using a heated pool? Keeping the heater on a single house-level timer so they don't have to think about it rather than planning ahead what rooms they will be in later?
Everyone will have a different place they draw the "waste" vs sensible expenditure line.
The correct economic solution to this is CO2-offsetting taxes and letting each individual decide how they want to spend their resources. Trying to centrally plan for a hundred million diverse people with different things they like and care about is a recipe for unneeded misery.
Taxes just push the problem into poor people. If you want a fair solution we should have carbon/resource rationing. In fact, I'd prefer a solution in which the governments work hard (much harder than they are) to bootstrap the brave new world so everyone can benefit from a sustainable world.
Rationing is ridiculously inefficient.
People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch.
Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.
Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible:
UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions.
Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take, are collectively owned by the people. So it could make sense to distribute those amongst the people. The people could then sell them in a free® market. This means we can work towards both goals at once: Those seeking to pollute more, could simply buy the carbon credits from their fellow people, who can now better afford to live. And, at the same time, total pollution is capped-ish, depending on the scheme.
As a fun note, UBI is just rationing out the available funds for UBI, so it would suffer from any rationing-specific failings that carbon rationing would suffer from.
A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release.
Ideally you'd have credits being available for purchase at prices that correspond to the costs of mitigating their externalities (CO2 emission is not in and of itself evil, its the consequences that we don't want).
We don't want trade. We want people to reduce their carbon consumption. In any case, you could always allow trading of rations.
It’s up to individuals to decide if they are wasting their own resources. Everyone has a different perspective. Personally, I think SUVs are a waste and should be banned, but wouldn’t that be overreaching?
Individuals don’t pay for their waste when they aren’t paying for negative externalities.
That’s why a carbon tax is a better solution - it ensures people are paying the true price for a resource. Let people decide their own life after that, they’ll do a better of job of it than someone else deciding their life for them.
(You probably need more than just a carbon tax to fairly price the resource. For example, mining fossil fuels causes health issues for workers, and impacts the local environment.
This is likely to happen and is economically awful (far better to have constant carbon taxes), but it will be done because the majority supports it, not due to some government plot against the people.
Elected officials get into office with majority support of a constituency, but that's very far away from the majority of people supporting their collective actions while in office. In the US, politicians do what money wants them to, not voters. Consent of voters is often manufactured and misinformed.
Fossil fuel interests have really rotted a lot of minds with their propaganda.
In some ways this may turn out to be a bigger crime than the carbon issues you think are just a conspiracy to control shower length.
I don't think this is fair to him. He's not alleging carbon stuff is a conspiracy to control shower length, merely that moralizers will want to control everything they see as "waste".
As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.
I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.
This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.
At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more than 10 years given the investment the government is putting in. (I think roll-out started like 7 years ago and is expected to be finished around 2030 in Belgium.)
Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.
The core problem is that these devices are garbage, and nobody cares. I don't mean that scornfully, I'm saying these devices are way over-provisioned and yet are unreliable anyway because they are very carelessly designed, and nobody cares because 1) they have no economic incentive to care, and 2) in the software world it's normal for cheap devices to fail within 10 years, and the people who refuse to accept this norm have no recourse except building their own piece of electronics (i.e. take up a hobby).
Demanding they provide the data 'in a standard format' lets us put lipstick on the pig, it doesn't actually solve the core problem of the device being a piece of shit.
We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong.
I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's energy consumption alongside(and therefore show the day's cost so far). Octopus provides an API to query the kWh used....but only for the last day. I even got their little Octopus Mini that broadcasts live usage to their app but I have not been able to query the live data from it from my raspberry, I don't have the necessary skills in web technologies to do that unfortunately :-(
If you use Home Assistant on the Pi there is an Octopus integration that you might find handy. It even works with the Octopus Mini
https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/
Hope this is useful
Ooooooh thanks that is actually super useful - had no idea this existed! Thank you!
Mine comes with a display that shows live usage by energy rather than price. The octopus app shows my usage for yesterday in £ for octopus tracker, broken down into 30m increments.
I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all.
As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?
I agree fully, I believe that my Home Assistant energy dashboard has done more for our energy consumption than any other measure.
If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors.
The energy dashboard will give an overview of your gas and electricity usage, solar production, proportion used from grid/solar and even a home battery if present. It’s really great.
Combine it with some Aqara (zigbee but easily overloaded) or Shelly (WiFi and I find them very robust) energy monitoring power sockets and you get a very good idea of the simplest measures to take to save power. You can even add cost/kWh and M3 (gas) to the sensors in HA.
I have the same setup. I used it to make a green light go on when we have more than 500 watt excess solar production, so my wife knows she can turn on the washing machine for free.
That’s very cool. Btw our dishwasher (and laundry machine) has 2 peaks at 2 kW, our dryer does 500 W continuous.
Makes sense since you're in the netherlands, euro appliances generally get fed cold water and warm it internally, the 2kW peaks would be when it needs to warm up the cold water.
The dryer has to warm air up pretty continuously to dry the contents. At 500W I assume it's a heat pump? (IIRC condensers are usually around or above 1kW)
Ah yes, the dish and laundry washers are indeed not “hot fill”, that is hard to find here indeed.
The dryer is a heat pump yes, some years ago it was the most energy efficient one we could find. (But I guess it runs longer, relying more on tumbling than heat, and wears out cloth faster).
I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent.
Also, I wonder why compressors in heatpumps are not multi-speed (basically energy consumption can be modulated). If you are an expert please let me know I'd love to talk more.
You can find them but they'll be in the semi-professional space and above (relatively expensive high-duty).
They're very rare in the consumer space because
- it requires running more hot water lines / extensions, historically houses are built with lots of cold water lines but hot water lines only where required
- for their heating requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically
- they require an internal heater anyway as residential water circuits come nowhere near the high temperature cycles: 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45, the standard high temp cycles for washing machines are 60 and 90, and dishwasher commonly have a heavy cycle around 65
- it makes the machines more convoluted since they needs more inlets, a mixing valve, etc...
- they're not really compatible with hot water tanks: you don't want your dishes or laundry to empty your shower water, plus hot water tanks are commonly electrical so there's no real gain given per the above the machines need a heater anyway
US uses a split phase system so you can combine two 120V circuits to get 240V. This is how most heavy appliances are wired.
Right but that means you need a special setup either way. In europe you just have a normal electric plug, nothing special.
Also, in quite a few houses, the initial run of water out of the hot tap is cold for quite some time until the hot water has either made it round from the hot tank, or if you have a combi boiler system then after that has fired itself up, got up to temperature, and then the hot water has made it round the pipes from there. It may be that the washing machine uses so little water that most of the water it gets from the hot supply is cold, wasting all that energy.
That is true, I assume hot water appliances handle that case internally, but that's yet more complexity.
My dishwasher is European and is hot-fill. It doesn’t even have a cold water connection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cold fill dishwasher in the US.
I wonder what’s up in Europe.
What happens if it gets hot water, but expects cold? Seems like if it's not too hot to melt plastic parts, it would be ok?
The colder cycles will not work correctly (they have only one inlet and no mixing circuit), they might scale more than normally, and I wouldn't be surprised if some put themselves into a security mode.
The plastics used for some of the inlet circuitry might also age abnormally when it gets 50C water rather than the, say, 10~30C range it is designed for.
I have no frame of reference but I have a feeling here (usa) it's super illegal to "tamper" with any pub utilities infrastructure. Could be wrong, though, but no usb ports.
That's really cool though I wish we could do that.
No doubt about the tampering comment. However, my gas, water, and electric meters are all wireless and now I want to be able to monitor them for on demand usage. We shall see.
Has there been talk about that becoming a thing?
In PG&E land, you can buy one of a handful of approved ZigBee gadgets that can read out your meter data.
P1 port is specifically to read values and “open”. There a 10€ cable to convert it (passively) to usb.
You could consider one of those clamps that measure the power through a cable from the fields around it?
If only the meters had ny power nearby or offered a 5V USB port on it so you could plug in your reader and forget it. But no. Now I'd have to keep a small Li-ion battery living in -20C since the meters are typically outside and there is never any power nearby since they are in a closed cabinet. Only the people who have indoor power meters (I know zero cases of that with detached houses, I think the power companies require the meter to be outside in a cabinet they can access without access to the house.
I just made a socket near it ;)
P1 ports in the newer standard versions supply power.
Being able to see your usage is helpful - at least, for those of us interested.
For example, I was surprised to see how much our electronics (stereo, amplifier, TV, etc.) in the living room use, even when off (some devices are older, with high standby currents). It motivated me to put everything on a timer that only turns power own in the evenings, since that's the only time they get used.
It's a small thing, but small things add up.
Yeah we were away from home recently and it was interesting to see that with everything "off" we were still using a constant 200W or so, so even with no one home we used just over 4kWh each day. 120kWh each month just for "idle" usage definitely is not trivial amount of money, at current prices that's £20!
Half of that is fridge which at 10 quid a month is cheap. Then another 20w for wifi router which again, looking at what you pay to your ISP is nothing.
So you got 8 pounds to account for which at UKs minimum wage is about 1 hours worth of work?
That's a weird point to make - I'm just saying 120kWh a month for a house with no one in it and just some basic appliances and network equipment is a LOT - in developing countries 120kWh would be the average energy consumption of the entire house with people living in it, and we just "waste" that because I couldn't be bothered to switch off some devices in my house. It's not about whether I can afford it or not.
For comparison, I live alone in a mid-terraced 2-bedroom house in the UK, heated with gas - and I'm currently there most of the time. My monthly electricity usage is about 180kWh a month.
I'm guessing a big chunk of the 60kWh I'm using over your baseline is the kettle! :D
Uhm. We have a 3 bed semi detached house, my consumption for November was 1267kWh of electricity. In October it was 1148kWh. And I also heat with gas(well we have a minisplit upstairs that we sometimes use for heat, but it uses like 5kWh/day max)
No idea how you use so little lol.
I was surprised to learn that a timer itself also uses power. I borrowed a Kill-a-watt from the library and found that an 2 decades old timer uses 2.3W while a newer one uses 0.6W. That tells me that I should just keep the old timer for the rare occasions.
Not when you're on solar. Its more akin to being poor and shopping at dollar tree - cash/solar flow is more important than total cost.
Your experience also points to the limits of monitoring and subsequent behavioral change, though. I mean, yeah, it might prompt you to start your washing machine a bit earlier or a bit later to align with high production by your solar panels... but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead? Across Europe electricity meters are being replaced by smart meters and people are really hyping up the advantages of being able to continuously monitor your energy usage, but I think the jury is still out whether it'll actually lead to significant energy savings.
Ultimately the biggest wins are when big appliances and heating/cooling respond to self-production or take advantage of times when electricity is cheap (if you're on a per-hour or per-day dynamic contract), whether that's with a simple timer like the one you installed, a relay that shuts down heating when you're cooking or something fancier like a Fronius Ohmpilot [1] that tweaks heating power to exactly match PV (over)production.
[1] https://www.fronius.com/en/solar-energy/installers-partners/...
There's been a few simple experiments in the UK - where consumers have been encouraged to reduce usage at peak time that have been successful. But as you say its going to need the appliances to support it. Everything needs a "Get this done by X o'clock" whether thats a dishwasher/washing machine/car charger.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/23/households-gre...
I'm on Octopus Agile in the UK which offers pricing in 30 minute increments.
I'm lucky in that I have a small solar panel setup (3kW) and battery system (5kWh) to go with it. With this battery set-up you really don't need appliance support - most of the advantages are accrued by force-charging the batteries to avoid mains usage at the peak cost period (usually around 5pm-7pm).
I also have a few smart plugs which turn things on and off based on the current price and battery charge - using Home Assistant, but that's mainly me just nerding about. Handy when prices go negative, though and my electric immersion heater goes on to heat my hot water tank
Notably Octopus is working on taking much of the complexity away. There is now an opt-in service for certain battery makes where Octopus will take control of the battery charginng and discharging, to minimise your bill. It will even generate you money by doing a force charge and discharge when the grid is paying premium amounts
Your battery usage sounds exactly like the kind of behaviour they're trying to encourage but which aren't apparent to most people without an interest in these things so you left with the energy monitor which is really just a nice bonus to the system rather but is tangible to the lay person.
Of course the very real benefits of this can be abused by the gov and there are some conspiracy types using that to push their own agenda but on the whole I'm largely positive about the smart grid stuff.
In Finland you can get an electricity contract that follows the hourly spot prices. Usually the hourly prices varies in the range from 5c to 20c/kWh, but sometimes it jumps up to 40c, even 80c/kWh. The record was 2€/kWh for a couple hours in one day.
Current hourly prices for today and tomorrow:
https://oomi.fi/en/electricity/electricity-contracts/active/...
People who have chosen this kind of contract, usually reduce their consumption during the ridiculously expensive hours, which usually occur when there happens both low wind energy production, and simultaneously some power plant being offline for maintenance.
You can also get a contract with a fixed price, if you want.
Agree completely.
However, knowing that a particular device is bad means that when I eventually need to replace it in the future, I will also factor in energy efficiency and features such as it being able to check energy prices in my purchasing decision.
I have a friend that is diabetic (a number of friends, actually).
He has been doing a pretty lousy job of managing his diet.
Until his doctor prescribed a monitor for a few weeks.
This is a device that looks like a big Band-Aid that you put on your arm, inserting a fine needle under the skin, and communicates with an app on the phone, reporting things like glucose levels.
Once he realized the effects of the foods he was eating, he immediately changed his diet, and has been sticking to it, since (he no longer wears the monitor).
The UI of the app was pretty good. The historical data readout is what did it for him.
I think even people who don’t have diabetes could benefit from this. Would having access to my own glucose levels throughout the day give me some insights into how what I eat influences my own mood, energy levels etc?
Might, but as a non-diabetic your body self-regulate, so you'd usually see a large increase in blood sugars followed by a large drop as insulin blood levels increase and trigger its handling.
And because the sensor needle goes through the skin it must be replaced pretty regularly, and if it's not covered by insurance it's not exactly free (the link from the sibling indicates £57, that's per fortnight).
My diabetic colleague was super happy when they got one though, the "beep" of their checking their BAC is pretty funny and it's definitely more comfortable and sanitary than having to prick their finger every time, plus the full history view is useful as point check means there are dark holes between checks and you might not see some of the opportunities for improvements.
I am an MRI radiographer and get patients to take these off for their scans.
According to the link below [1] they are good for 7 days. They aren’t cheap and removing them does cause some friction so I try tie the MRI scan up with a pending monitor change and quiz diabetic patients about them at booking.
Some have gone into the scanner by accident (patients not declaring them) and they seem to survive but I emphasise that the results might not be accurate afterwards.
[1] https://www.diabeticwarehouse.org/products/dexcom-g4-and-g5-...
Yeah, it's pretty common. You can buy them for a reasonable amount and learn quite a bit: https://chemist2customer.com/freestyle-libre-2-sensor
This company is offering it as a service https://www.limborevolution.com/, it's expensive though. I haven't used it but the owner has had a few success. Shaq is also an investor.
Something in my apartment is consuming a ton of power and I don't know what. I would love a graph with a resolution better than a day.
If you're looking for something simple to try work it out, I bought a smart plug a few years back which could record usage for around 20USD, you can then move it between your devices getting a sense of each's usage.
Long term tracking usage of individual device energy usage is nice, but just knowing from past measurements how much a device tends to use is already very useful.
If you're going to go down this route and aren't afraid of a little DIY, then I'd highly recommend something that doesn't depend on the cloud.
Either ESPhome- or Tasmota-based plugs are great if you want fully local control (e.g. Athom, LocalBytes), or Shelly for local-first control with an option of connecting to their cloud.
Mostly everything else will lock you into the manufacturer's app & cloud. Zigbee is fully local too, but it requires additional hardware.
Do you have a conventional HWS? These are notoriously power-hungry, often poorly maintained and calibrated, and hard to monitor.
You can buy a power meter plug - that sits between appliance and socket - and work your way around almost all your appliances apart from, typically, oven, air conditioner(s), and hot water systems. For those you're going to need to experiment by turning as many things off as you can, to establish a baseline, and review your switch meter periodically for short (several minute) intervals, with and without the larger appliances turned on.
(You can get induction coil systems to report usage of these larger appliances, but they're typically onerously priced.)
If you can isolate the legs of the larger appliances, a CT clamp sensor is sufficient for an idea, and you can get those as handheld meters with screen - or something you plug into a microcontroller board and send the data to a local collection system.
Check the coffee machine. Full auto espresso machines can be huge hogs
Sounds pretty good as such. The worry to have these days, though, is if we can also get this without energy usage data being traded between all sorts of shady companies and/or criminal organizations.
You mean energy companies and governments?
There was a report recently that Facebook users have their data sold to 1000-5000 companies, and Facebook takes input from up to 100k companies when compiling data on people.
Supermarkets are also into the data game, exploiting the gold mine of data that is shopper loyalty cards.
Smart TVs are in the data game, selling details of what you’re watching on to other people.
Cars are recording visuals, audio, telemetry, and selling that on.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that energy companies are selling the data they’re collecting about you onto data brokers (aka shady companies and/or criminal organisations)
Home Assistant with a connector for whatever smart meter you have will happily do this for you without the data ever leaving your home.
About water consumption: depending on your make of water meter, there's often a small reflective wheel that turns eg. once for every liter. Sometimes these are made out of metal or even slightly magnetic. An arduino with an optical or Hall effect sensor might get you real far in real time, high resolution data collection!
Alternatively I've had success in wiring up a temperature probe directly to the incoming water line, and comparing that temperature to the ambient temperature. Where I live that works because the water arrives from underground & is always much cooler than ambient air. The time-integrated difference between the two is a proxy for how much water you use... this is much more involved to get meaningful data from, tho.
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Edit: a proximity sensor that detects metal might be the most straightforward thing, if you have a water meter with a rotating metal gauge https://www.alldatasheet.com/view.jsp?Searchword=LJ12A3-4-Z/...
A lot of water meters these days have rfid for the water company to scan so maybe you can just abrogate that directly
On mobile so hard to link, but memory says OpenEnergyMonitor's docs site on pulse counters has a computer vision approach too. Think it reads the numbers from the display.
This problem can easily be solved without any device at all. Of course, it demands education and "intelligent behavior". If people only had the curiosity to read the specs on a heater and see "2000W" of power, and compare it to "15W" of power on the specs of the LED bulb. Same for water. One can just place a bowl under the faucet and measure the time it takes to fill up. Now you have your water consumption rate. We can choose the "device based" route, but this road end with Idiocracy and problems so "big" nobody can solve them.
If we're comparing apples to apples all the time, sure. I think it's pretty obvious to most people who care to look that a 60w conventional bulb uses more energy than a 15w LED bulb (which, for the record, is the 100w conventional equivalent). Consider, however, these questions:
If my 2000w heater is running on the 800w setting and turns on when my room has dropped below the point I consider acceptably chilly and turns off above that point, how much electricity have I used in the last hour?
If I have 3 15w LEDs on a dimmer and run them intermittently throughout the day, how much electricity have I used in the last hour?
If my TV is off, but plugged in, and accesses the Internet a few times a day automatically to check for new versions, how much power has it used today?
I think this makes the case for, at least, a kill-a-watt style device. A whole home solution with sufficient report granularity and a report interface visible in the home would be worth the extra trouble, IMHO.
Edit: For the record, these are all real-scenarios from my house.
A while ago I bought one of those plug-in power monitors, and went around measuring everything I could find around the house. It's a worthwhile exercise, I think. You can leave an appliance plugged into it for as long as you like to get an average. I was able to make a pie chart of where my electricity is used in my house, which was enlightening, and led to some useful changes.
About monitoring water consumption, maybe using some webcam + OCR would help to recognize reading of a water meter? Then Home Assistant would be helpful to see charts with energy consumption etc
This is what I am using for this exact purpose: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device
Per device energy tallies also give you interesting data.
Home Assistant can do that in the Energy dashboard, and you can answer questions/learn surprising things, like how much energy my "rack" (UPS+mac mini+5 disk bay+a few other things) actually uses vs e.g my fridge or my washing machine, or my desk compute actually is quite low but boy does the screen costs a lot when active, or what does charging the electric bike costs, or what's the effect of setting thermostat to 19 instead of 20 in winter, or oh wow in summer this fan that we use a lot to make things bearable actually ends up using as much energy as our water heater!
(power measurements are done using Shelly Plug Plus S + 3EM + 4PM devices, thermal measurements using Shelly H&T Plus)
I find it better to remain ignorant in that regard. Jokes aside, it's also interesting seeing wall draw vs UPS draw vs PSU draw if each piece of your equipment supports that.
The Shelly stuff is also quite fun to play with (I recommend a AC adapter for H&T). I have the little black spherical sensors and the data resolution is significantly worse on battery since it tries to sleep in low power state as much as possible. It's fun to see the server cabinet (mine's enclosed) vs room vs different room temps. You can also see when the HVAC cycles on and off and when someone takes a shower (humidity spikes).
Corollary: people are cheap and lazy, so if you want them to not do something, make it cumbersome in a way that does not justify the cost difference, or vice versa.
If your meter is not too old, it probably sends wireless signal for consumption data. It can be read with https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
Like you I have a solar system (Sunsynk) and it gives all sorts of wonderful stats, but I hardly bother looking at it as it is meaningless information - just wish it was more intelligent to balance battery discharge vs loadshedding schedule vs weather of the day.
I have to manually set things up for winter vs summer.
My geyser which is not on solar is on a IOT controller (Hotbot) and I set the times I want the water to be heated and it knows when there is loadshedding (3G) so it can intelligently deviate from my set times.
Thanks for sharing. Does the system supply grid voltage to your home autonomously, i.e. when the grid is offline? Does it work on all three phases? In Germany, most of the systems need the grid to be online in order to work.
The Sense system is great for this, gives you second level data, and identifies most appliances when they turn on. I enjoy using it!
I’d argue that if you want people to be environmentally friendly, you need to abstract all data, dashboards , etc,
The system must just work behind the scenes and optimise energy use as much as possible automatically.
Overlaying outdoor temperature is also helpful. One degree HVAC change makes a lot bigger difference when it's 0F (-18C) vs 40F (4C) outside
I've seen decent reviews on the "no plumbing required" water meters. Flume has a product available in the U.S. that gets pretty good reviews (https://www.amazon.com/Flume-Smart-Water-Monitor-Detector/dp...).
You can set this up non-invasively with ultrasonic flow meters like the TUF-2000M. It isn’t cheap, but it does work quite alright if you don't want any of the risks associated with cracking open your pipes.
(There are also cheaper options if you don’t mind opening up your pipes too.)
Depending on your water meter this device may be useful: https://www.homewizard.com/watermeter/
Also, we need to stop gaslighting people with fake solutions like "planting trees" or "deleting emails". Sure, it's good, but the scale is so small that you're actually losing focus on what really makes changes.
Unpopular opinion: shifting environmental blame to individual consumers is a form of gaslighting (pun not intended, but still good). You may use spend a fortune on solar, heating pumps and A-clsss appliances, but will never save a fraction of power consumption of a single datacenter cabinet or aluminium furnace. One large enough manufacturing plant cancels out all environmental initiatives of a medium town, including public spaces.