Now You Can Use Google’s PowerMeter without a Smart Meter

Imagine if you could see, in real time, exactly how your household was using electricity. You could easily root out all of your energy hogs, allowing you to increase your energy efficiency and lower your bills. That’s the promise of smart meter technology.

A smart meter is basically a traditional power meter with a brain. Instead of just telling how much electricity you’ve used since the last time you looked at it, they also reveal precisely when you used it, and what you used it for. All of this data can then be interpreted online in a new crop of software tools, where people can dig into the data and really understand how their family uses electricity.

Google’s PowerMeter is one of the most popular of these tools, and is completely free of charge. The only downside is that until now, smart meters were the only way to get your data into the PowerMeter system. While smart meters are terrific, they are only available in certain places at the moment, leaving most people with no way to monitor their electricity use with the service.

This week though, Google announced its first device partner for the Power Meter platform, Energy Inc., makers of the TED (The Energy Detective) 5000 series of products. These devices offer all of the features of a traditional smart meter, but are available to everyone, not just those lucky enough to have access to a smart meter. All TED 5000 owners can now export their electricity data into PowerMeter and access it everywhere from their home PC their cell phone.

The TED 5000 series is available today right now at the official TED store starting at $199.95.

Comments

[power meter Queen]

this is a very nice project, I use a power meter but it would be better if I could exactly know when do i use energy