Digital Home Thoughts: Powerhouse Dynamics eMonitor Bring Uber Power Usage Monitoring to the Home

"The cutting-edge feature of the eMonitor is its capability to display electricity use by individual circuit so you can see real-time and historical information on major appliances, entertainment centers, and specific rooms. The service keeps you continuously up to speed on your home's energy usage by providing you with alerts if circuits are overloaded, if there are problems with appliances or your renewable sources, if your electricity usage is unusual, or if your energy bills are approaching a threshold (set by you)."

This unit looks pretty neat. I've been tracking our home energy usage for years using just the numbers from our house's power meter and a Kill-a-watt unit, and while I've been able to make a lot of improvements, the lack of granularity in the data is a huge issue in getting the most out of our conservation efforts. You may scoff at the $799 price tag, but then you are missing the value of good information. We looked into adding solar power to our home a few years back and after doing a lot of research I decided that conservation was a whole lot more cost effective. Plus, this should help you focus on the real energy hogs in your house, instead of worrying about turning off the light every time you leave the room, you really should be worrying about your old, inefficient dryer. As an example, I roughly calculated that our dryer was a big chunk of our electricity bill. Switching out to air drying a bulk of our laundry eliminated more electric usage from the grid than many thousands of dollars worth of solar panels would have.