Reviewing the TED: Consumer Home Electricity Use Monitoring

When we buy things, we are familiar with the same process. Whether we buy groceries, a night at the movies, gas for the car, holiday gifts, or some help with our taxes - we gather information about what we want to buy and we weigh our desire for the good or the service with the amount it will cost us. Imagine buying something and having no idea how much it would cost - or no idea about how much we were buying. We would never do that, right?

With electricity, we seem to do exactly that. We've grown used to the idea that a bill comes at the end of the month charging us for the electricity that we've used, and we've had no easy way to really keep track of what we were purchasing – or what it was costing us. Some of us may have a general sense of how much we more we pay when we leave the office lights on all night, but for the most part the costs and quantities are a black box.

An exciting promise of the smart grid is to empower individuals to monitor their energy use and costs - making the black box of our personal electricity use more transparent. Disappointingly, the utilities haven't appeared to make much effort on this front. Why? Perhaps part of the problem is that utilities are in the business of selling a product, not in educating consumers about how to spend less on their product.

So a class of devices have burst on the consumer scene promising to empower consumers to measure their electricity use. Among them is the Kill A Watt and The Energy Detective. InfoUse has been familiarizing itself with one of the devices to learn more about the promises of this market. Our conclusion based on the use of one of one of the leading products – the TED 5000G is this: The possibilities of what the TED device can do are exciting, but unfortunately, the TED 5000G hardware, for a variety of technical reasons, is not yet fit for a broad consumer market.

However, if you are an early adopter, to keep up one's humor with the TED, it is best to remember that the TED is an educational tool. Among the things you will learn are: How to pack oversized objects into your circuit breaker box, keeping sanity while configuring the device and updating firmware, and patience with technical support. However, my humor ran out when I learned that the TED's dependency on the electrical system of a building for communications between devices meant that nearly all of the outlets in my home were unusable because of “noise” in the electrical system. The device also requires an ethernet cable for communications, so for those with a noiseless outlet nearby an ethernet connection, you win the TED lottery. And those without, lose.

Devices like the TED promise to finally let us see what they are purchasing from our utility company. But save yourself the pain, and wait a couple of years until some products come into the marketplace that are built for consumers.