Student charts electrical usage in real-time, much to Big Brother's delight

It's our best guess that University of Florida PhD student Jason Winters woke up at 10:00AM ET this morning and took an approximately 18-minute shower. How did we come to this conclusion? Using an AC clamp attached to an ioBridge, the biomedical engineering scholar measures the main electrical lines entering his house and sends the data to a Google charts widget on his personal blog that reports the kilowatt-hour usage in real time. As a footnote, he presents an example graph of when the hot water is turned on, which then produces close to 4500 watts. That's just over the amount of power he used this morning for about 1100 seconds. Of course, we can't say for certain any of these morning events really transpired, but then again, we don't exactly want to know. Hit up the read links for directions on DIYing this.

[Vcize Posted Jan 20th 2009 10:15AM]

This just reminds me how stupid it is that in this era of technology our electricity bill still comes from some guy who walks around and looks at a meter outside everyone's home.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 20th 2009 10:56AM]

Is there no-one else that realizes the water heater doesn't shut off right after you turn off the faucet? Water doesn't heat instantly.

I love the timer on the water heater idea. That could really save some money. Would be nice to hook into your digital thermostat.

[solarbuddy Posted Jan 20th 2009 11:01AM]

I love this guy (and I also love long showers--now, don't be hating) and want him to build one for my house. I've got 4.7KW of PV solar on my house, and NOBODY IN THE WORLD seems to build a gizmo that will monitor my home consumption *and* my daily generation in a way that allows me to optimize (or at least log) my energy flow. WTF?!?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 20th 2009 11:23AM]

Sure, it's not exactly a new idea -- but it's a good one. Energy monitoring is becoming a big trend -- especially in this economic landscape -- because people (and companies) can save a lot of money simply by monitoring and controlling their power usage. Several people above have posted links to commercially available energy monitoring systems, and there are also open systems that are being used by renewable energy companies as a service to their customers to help them visualize and control the amount of energy they are using in real-time. Here's one of the better examples: http://fatspaniel.com/

[hapadude Posted Jan 20th 2009 5:55PM]

Am I the only one who noticed this -- how does taking a shower use electricity? Does he have an electric heat exchanger instead of a water heater (which is usually powered by gas)? Maybe the electricity spike are from the lights in the bathroom?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 20th 2009 7:23PM]

Depends on where you live. I'm lucky to have gas hot water, but electric is still very common, all the apartments I've ever seen in my region are all electric, as are most rural homes. Here in the Northwest, electricity has traditionally been cheap, and in recent years natural gas has spiked such that the price has almost caught up with electric.

[sullivan504 Posted Jan 20th 2009 6:12PM]

This is another product which needs to be far more commonplace-- such that an electrician wouldn't think twice about installing such a monitor when doing a rewiring job.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 20th 2009 7:21PM]

Pretty cool project, it's one of those things that nobody really needs, but it's totally cool just the same, I'd do something similar if I didn't have a mountain of other projects lined up.

The power factor is the biggest challenge here, he estimates it at 0.70, which is probably a reasonable estimate for overall consumption, but it varies widely on a device by device basis. A pure resistive load such as a light bulb, water heater, or baseboard heater has a power factor of 1.0 (unity), but a cheap fluorescent lamp (including most CFLs) or induction motor lacking power factor correction can be 0.5 or lower, meaning that the true wattage you are billed for is half what you get from calculating the Volt-Amps. Some devices have a leading power factor, while some are lagging, lead and lag cancel each other out, but there is rarely an even balance of both. To get an accurate reading, you need to measure the voltage, which varies +/- a few volts over time, and the power factor.

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 21st 2009 5:41AM]

There was a report on the local news here in SE England yesterday, a small utility company was starting to provide real time monitoring of power usage. The report added that to roll out the scheme nationally would mean changing 46 Million meters. However, the system in this article is an aftermarket add on that could be implemented more easily. Live usage can then be fed to the the domestic local area network (wirelessly) and hence stored on the customer's PC or fed back to the utility server farm and browsed from the web. The user can then monitor and manage their usage. It could also be fed via bluetooth, etc or stored on a cell-phone linked device so the utility co could collect the usage without a visit.
By the way, using a shower for 30 mins rather than 10 will presumably use more power as well as more water. Power to heat the water used and probably also to drive the pump. So even if you live in a water-rich area you are still depleting global resources by showering for 20 minutes more than your peers.