Electricity Meter

[redpoint5]

Well I dropped my idle consumption average over night from about 560w down to 510w, mostly from discovering that my work PC was set to never sleep or turn off the display (3 of them).

• My office dropped from 105 watts to 45
  
• The furnace accounts for about 150 watts idle consumption where it keeps temps above 65 degrees.
• The refrigerator accounts for about 75 watts of idle consumption.
• Bedroom is still idling at 40 watts- I need to find out why.
• Modem, router, server consumption is around 30 watts; just below the threshold for a branch circuit to detect

That all adds up to 330 watts, so I've got nearly 200 watts unaccounted for at this point. Time to switch off breakers and see what happens. This process of hunting down phantoms involves starting out with the big picture and slowly zeroing in on branch circuit consumption, and then individual energy consumers.

[oil pan 4]

This is definitely cheaper than generating power.

[hayden55]

Nice! Time to start adding 2nd life solar panels and inverters to your house. :P

[redpoint5]

I've got a guy stopping by to evaluate my home for solar today.

Maybe I should purchase the minimum amount of solar that maximizes the various local incentives, then add my own to it later when I have time. Then again, my rough estimate is that the minimum to capture all the incentives is roughly what I'd need to offset my use.

That's an 8 kW system for me.

6 kW would max the incentives for my parents.

[hayden55]

You're a spread sheet guy. I'd recommend doing your own solar calculations. I've done a lot of calculations, but I noticed the ROI was not good. Even with a lot of DIY/refurb/2nd life stuff it takes a lot of labor with little return. Let me know what information he gives you.
p.s. batteryhookup apparently is going to start adding the 2nd life hospital solar inverter/panels soon. Per the owner on facebook.

[teoman]

This meter looks interesting.

https://youtu.be/s45bd3nFmDg

[redpoint5]

It looks interesting, but it's got a lower Amazon rating and costs 3x as much. I might get it sometime and see which I like better, and give my parents the other one.

[hayden55]

It will be interesting to see your daytime/nightime power use. You could basically focus in on how big of a battery you would need.

[redpoint5]

I'm down to about 120w continuous draw unaccounted for at the moment. 40 of those are somewhere on the master bed/bath circuit, and I'm at a complete loss there. When I kill the circuit, everything else in the house functions as far as I can tell.

I'll have to turn breakers off one by one and see how many watts each one is responsible for to isolate those last 120w. Don't know how I'll go about isolating the 40w from the master bed/bath.

I started labeling outlets and switches to relate it back to the breaker number. That's how much this drives me crazy.

[hayden55]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I'm down to about 120w continuous draw unaccounted for at the moment. 40 of those are somewhere on the master bed/bath circuit, and I'm at a complete loss there. When I kill the circuit, everything else in the house functions as far as I can tell.

I'll have to turn breakers off one by one and see how many watts each one is responsible for to isolate those last 120w. Don't know how I'll go about isolating the 40w from the master bed/bath.

I started labeling outlets and switches to relate it back to the breaker number. That's how much this drives me crazy.

Sounds like you might have a component leaking voltage to ground. Ground fault. A lot of the time it's not enough to trigger gfci if it is even there.
You can always try moving brakers, switches, plugs around and see if the problem follows to the new slot you move it to.