I am wanting to better understand the consumption of energy in my home.
In the end, what I would like to do is know the whole house load, all the measured loads, all the accounted loads and the vampire load. I want to be able control the known loads and minimize the vampire load.
I am measuring the whole house load with an Aeon Labs Home Energy Monitor.
I am wanting to measure variable loads with SmartSwitches or Z-Wave Kill-A-Watts.
I am wanting to account for lighting, various fans and other fixed loads.
Vampire loads + variable loads + fixed loads = total consumption.
Vampire loads = total consumption - variable loads - fixed loads
I would like Vera to display the whole house load, the various fixed loads and the measured loads and compute the vampire load.
In this simple example, I measure the whole house load to be 764 watts and the known loads (430 watts measured from the refrigerator and 80 watts accounted from the switch) to be subtracted, leaving me with my vampire load.
I know my vampire loads are currently around 220-250 watts. The refrigerator is on the SmartSwitch reports that it’s 430 watts when the compressor runs. It properly reports 0 watts when the refrigerator just sits there. It also properly reports about 6 watts when the door is open. My kitchen lights are on a GE/Jasco 45609 switch. The light switch properly reports 80 watts when the lights are on.
-===-
Just about all fixed and accountable loads such as lights, dimmed lights, fans, stereo, etc. are on switches, dimmers and switched outlets.
My refrigerator is a variable load and is now on a SmartSwitch to measure it. I plan to measure the load for other variable loads such as my TV, washer, dishwasher, microwave, power strips (for the transformer farms). etc. This will require 6-7 more SmartSwitches. My hot water heater and stove are gas and don’t enter the equation. My clothes dryer is 220 and will show up prominently in the whole house measurement.
The vampire loads are things like my Internet modem, my router, Vera, my network storage drive, the doorbell transformer, the garagedoor remote control receiver and three transformer farms for charging cell phones, laptops, TVs etc.