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Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog

Weblog for Mark Fletcher

Whole-House Electricity Monitor ThoughtsJanuary 5

As a followup to my previous post, I've been testing two whole-house electricity monitors for close to the last month. As I mentioned previously, I ordered a TED1001 Energy Detective Monitor, and planned to just install/use that. After my previous post, David Olsen at Black & Decker contacted me, and offered to ship me a Black & Decker EM100B Power Monitor. Actually, he shipped me two of the devices, and I gave the second one to my parents, who are trying to figure out why their electricity bills are higher than their neighbors. Big thanks to David and Black & Decker.

So, I have both monitors installed now. I was able to install the Black & Decker monitor myself, but needed help from a friend to install the TED1001. See my previous post for the differences in how the monitors are installed. The TED samples usage once a second. The B&D appears to sample every 30 seconds or so. The TED connects to your Windows PC and lets you graph energy usage through a Flash-based desktop app. The app does work under Parallels on a Mac (which is what I used). I emailed the manufacturer asking about a native Mac versi

Whole-House Electricity MonitorsNovember 30 2008

Over the past year or two, my electric bill has ranged between $300 and $600, which seems, umm, high to me. I want to know what's using all that electricity. Maybe I have a refrigerator that's running all the time, using too much electricity. Maybe some of my numerous toys are acting as energy vampires, and simply unplugging them will significantly cut my electric bill. But right now, I have no idea.

So, this afternoon I researched and purchased a whole-house electricity monitor. These devices function as your electric meter does, tracking how much electricity you use on a real-time basis. The difference is that you get the data inside your house on a handy digital readout, and in some cases, on your computer, making it much easier to figure out what devices are hogging electricity.

It appears that there are two main whole-house monitors, the Energy Detective Monitor (aka TED1001) and the Black & Decker EM100B Power Monitor (which appears to be a rebrand of a device called the Power Cost Monitor). Both devices track your whole-house energy usage, but they do

My cats in the New York TimesOctober 4 2008

Well, not really, but I am quoted in this article on straight, single men who own cats. It's a silly piece, which the author Abby Ellin fully admitted when we talked. And actually, I think I laughed through the entire interview, which I'm sure didn't make me a good interview subject. Having never, you know, been interviewed about my cats before, it was an interesting experience.

I can't say that I necessarily agree that it's only now becoming socially acceptable for a straight single man to own a cat (or two). But who can argue with the quote that "[t]hey make the best boyfriends..." and that "straight men with cats seem to be really secure and stable." Hey, if it's in the New York Times, it's true!

A ReminderJuly 30 2008

For those interested, I'm doing most of my blogging these days on Twitter. And I'm posting my pictures on Flickr. Alternatively, I do have a FriendFeed account which aggregates these other accounts, but I don't actually spend time on FriendFeed myself.

YosemiteJune 10 2008

Continuing my experiments with iPhone panoramas (and risking turning this blog into just a photo-blog), this was stitched together using Photoshop CS3 from three pictures I took this weekend. I'm not terribly happy with the colors, but I'm a bit limited with the iPhone.