Plug-in electricity smart meters

Undervalued

matelodave wrote: »

Mines the clamp round the cable type and so records everything in the house. If you look at the dashboard link above you'll see how we are chewing through leccy at this very moment whilst my wife is doing the washing & tumble drying. The sawtooth during the night is the heatpump kicking in and out.

It's hard to specifically quantify how accurate it is because of some of the stuff we've got - the heating for instance is an inverter driven heat pump and so I suspect that the power factor is all over the place.

However that said it can record when lights are switched on and off, the TV and even when my wife is using her sewing machine. You can see the fridge & freezer switching on an off and when we switch the coffee machine on & off and I can view it remotely should I feel the need.

I reckon it probably undereads by around 10% depending on the load - I guess that motors and stuff with strange waveforms wont be as accurate as say resistive loads like kettles and heaters.

I've got a pretty good idea of whats on by looking at the loads and can check that stuff is turned off when it should be.

It is also quite sobering how much a house uses on "standby" these days! Lots of devices don't have a physical on / off switch and in some cases unplugging them can cause other issues. My house only drops to about 180 watts overnight unless I go round physically unplugging items that would normally expect to be plugged in 24 / 7. Even then there is the burglar alarm, door bell, aerial amplifiers in the roof, etc etc so maybe down to 100 watts if I go away on holiday. Still two units a day! What price convenience?