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Old 01-14-14, 10:29 PM   #5
MN Renovator
Less usage=Cheaper bills
 
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Minneapolis, MN
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I still have my Black and Decker power monitor, it no longer receives the signal from the base station. ..or I think that's the issue because it worked fine for about 3 weeks and then the indoor device would sporadically go to sleep mode which the manual says is because it doesn't have communication with the base station. I changed the batteries in both the indoor and outdoor pieces and then after a week it was back to doing it again every night and I had to press the sync button on a daily basis. Eventually it just completely stopped connecting entirely. The outdoor unit indicates it has power when I press the reset button on it and the indoor unit doesn't show any signs of an issue until it goes to sleep from lack of communication.

It's not too hard to setup though but I did have some major beef with the inability for it to show anything under 300 watts. To their credit, its hard when you are counting the black bar on the wheel and so its the nature of this form of measurement but it was weird watching it show 0 watts for ~30 seconds, show 300 watts for ~30 seconds and drop back to zero when you have a load under 300 watts. When it was working properly, it seemed to have reasonable accuracy but it didn't last long.

If I did it again, I'd go with something that has a current clamp on it, something like a TED. Once I got my electric bill down to 75kwh per month once, I figure there is little room to improve. I did find the most interesting part was seeing how much the air conditioner's power draw varied based on outdoor temperature. I was also surprised to see the dishwasher use 1-2kwh and 50 minutes of dryer time only using 3kwh and seeing the element cycle on and off during the cycle.
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