How Do Whole Home Energy Monitors Work?

My wife and I have been striving for years to make our home completely energy neutral. We have mostly accomplished our goal by using a variety of different strategies. Among the energy saving steps we have taken are spray foam insulation in the attic, low E windows, Energy Star appliances and a rooftop solar electric system in partnership with our local utility company. Keeping tabs on how much energy our home is using is using at any given time is a vital part of our strategy to have zero energy bills. To see how much energy our home is using we use a whole home energy use monitor. At first the thought of spending money on something in order to save money later seems hard to believe in. There are a few gadgets that will actually pay you back after using them, among these are whole home power consumption monitors. There are many good models on the market, including Blueline, Current Cost and eGauge. The model that I use in particular is the ENVI-CC128 made by Current Cost. We chose it since it is compatible with computer home energy use monitoring programs such as Google Power Meter. Google Power Meter is a free program from Google that I use to monitor our home's energy use from any computer or smart phone. Knowing your home's energy use in real time, from anywhere, is also a safety device. You can be alerted of an odd increase in power consumption from things like broken well pumps, refrigerators, etc., and correct the problem before a huge increase in your bill.

How Do Home Energy Use Monitors Work?

In the past, when many outdoor home electric meters used an aluminum wheel that turned inside a glass case, there were products that would sense the black band that turned around, convert this into a signal, and send it inside to a whole home energy use meter. Nowadays many home electric meters are digital and this type of pick-up device will not work. To solve this problem most home energy use monitors work using current sensing clips which you place over the main electrical wires outside. Just like an electrician's clamp on amperage meter, they can give a fairly accurate reading of how much current is flowing through the two main leads into your home's breaker box. Most do-it-yourselfer's can install this device, but if in doubt one should have an electrician perform the task. Most of the decent brands of home energy use meters cost around $100 to $200. The payback can be much shorter than you think. Rather than being just a toy, home energy use meters can show you things like a faulty hot water heater element or energy wasting light fixture by indicating just how much your home's energy use increases when the device is turned on. These whole home energy use monitors will show you how much your home is using in real time, how much you have used in the past 24 hours, month, year, etc. Since our rooftop home PV solar panel system has an indoor wireless status monitor we can place the two meters side by side and know exactly if we are selling power to the grid or using more than we produce. If I see that we are using too much power, I try and locate the source and turn it off. In our case the whole home power use monitor paid for itself in only about four months. That is because it helped locate a burned out element on our hot water heater that was causing it to run twice as long to heat up our water.

I'm a fan of the brand of home energy use monitor that we purchased. I'd have to give a favorable review of the ENVI-CC128 power monitor. With a sensor battery life of seven years, it should be working well for years. There are several good brands on the market. Even if you don't have a smart phone you should still consider one that is compatible with Google Power Meter and other home energy monitoring software programs. To read more tips on how to have zero bills read my other hub, How To Live Comfortably With Zero Bills

There are some great books on how to make your home ultra energy efficient. One of my favorite ones, that applies to any type of home, is "Energy Efficient Homes For Dummies".

More Tips On Buying A Home Energy Consumption Meter

Choose a whole home energy use monitor that has good ratings. For example, check the reviews on sites like Amazon first. Avoid ones such as The Energy Detective that use your home's power line to transmit the signal and avoid those models that do not use clip on amperage sensors.