TED: The Energy Detective

The last two months we've gotten some pretty outrageous electricity bills. My wife's first inclination was that the furnace upstairs was not a propane-fired furnace, but rather a heat pump. It would appear that she is correct.

However, that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to see where we were using our electricity over the course of a longer period of time. To that end, I purchased TED: The Energy Detective. It came on Friday, today I installed it.

Here's the content of the package (not showing the software CD):


The contents of the brown box, are just more of the same of what is laid out on the table: two more round clips (called Current Transformers or CTs) and the Measuring Transmitting Unit (or MTU). The MTU is in a plastic housing which itself doesn't feel too cheap, but the connector (for the two CTs), is horrible. I had issues with both MTUs of getting it to connect - it took way too long and way too much fiddling around to get it done. In addition, the second MTU's plastic connector was loose on one side of the MTU. Doesn't give one a whole lot of confidence in the build quality of TED.

Installation:
To install TED, you have to open up your circuit breaker and potentially expose yourself to all sorts of dangerous shock hazards. Anything I write about here is not instructional in nature and none of it should be relied on to do this yourself.

First, let's look at the electricity setup of my house:

There are two parallel 200 AMP circuit breakers next to each other. The loads that they serve are obviously unique and here is how they are split up:


The first step in dealing with the breakers is to take off the front panel (there were for screws to do this). You may want to throw the breaker first - I chose not to because I wanted to do a before and after to ensure my multi-meter was working and that I wouldn't fry myself. Specifically, after removing the cover, I checked the voltage from the screw on the top most circuit breaker to the neutral bar. It read 110 Volts. After I flipped the main circuit breaker (which took a surprising amount of effort), it measured 0 Volts. After I took the cover off, this is what I saw:

IMHO, a pretty nicely organized box. At that point, there were several things to do: clip the CTs around the two main wires coming into the box, like so:

The next step is to connect the power for the MTU. This is done by connecting the black and white wires. For the white wire, you loosen one of the neutral bar screws, push the wire tip (it is pre-stripped for you) in and tighten the screw back in. Ideally, you would install another 15 Amp circuit breaker and connect the black wire to it. In my case, I loosened the screw for an existing 15 Amp breaker and added the black tip. At that point, I turned back on the breaker to make sure the MTU was functional. The little green LED started flashing, which I assumed meant that I was in business.


I went back upstairs to check out the TED Receiving Display Unit (RDU) to see if it could read the signal. To do so, I was told in the instructions that because I had the 1002 model (for 200 Amp service), I had to follow the instructions that came with the second MTU. Those instructions were a bit obnoxious (lots of repetitive steps referring to go back and repeat steps 3 & 4 - really, is ink that expensive that you couldn't have printed out each step?). I was quickly able to verify that the RDU was reading the signal from MTU.

I headed back down stairs to install the second MTU on the second circuit-breaker. After doing that, I added the second MTU signal to the RDU and I was in business reading both signals. For me, it was pretty obvious that it was, in fact, reading both signals. That was because the baseline power consumption on one was only 1.2 kWh/hr while when I added the second, it jumped up to ~5 kWh/hr.

At this point, I am data collection mode. I would like to wait until I have enough data to start being able to do some interesting data analysis. I bought the TED Footprints software with model, which is absurdly only Windows compatible. I'll report later on how well it works in identifying usage (primarily opportunities to reduce usage). Already, we've seen the instantaneous usage move from 2.4 kWh/hr to 11 kWh/hr. Looks like we may have room to reduce some usage.