Peak usage appears to be in the morning when we are getting ready for the day.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I had Brother’s Electric out to the house to install our TED. It took some doing even for the professional but we got ‘er done. Our circuit breaker is quite complicated. The house is over 100 years old after all.
The Gateway unit is presently plugged in to a kitchen outlet. The data travels from the MTU down in the circuit breaker across electrical lines to the Gateway. It’s important that there are no other electrical devices nearby or the RF interference may cause problems.
Since the Gateway isn’t upstairs in my office, where my router is, I’m not able to send the data to Google PowerMeter. What I do instead is set my laptop and review the graphs and numbers. The Gateway has enough memory to record 13 months of data. So it’s logging our power usage and providing a good baseline. Very soon I will be replacing fixtures and bulbs with more efficient solutions.
I’ve already begun to power down all computers and entertainment electronics when they aren’t in use. All of those devices are connected to power strips. A simple flick of the switch does the trick. No vampires in my office.
