Alt.CES: Oregon Scientific's wireless energy monitor

One of the offerings at this year’s CES that caught my eye was Oregon Scientific‘s Advanced Wireless Appliance Manager. This basically works the same as an Energy Logger, but without the disadvantages of only one plug in and having to lean down to your outlet to see your totals (a problem the tweet-a-watt doesn’t have, BTW!). Its stand-out feature is that the display can be programed to receive the wireless signals from up to eight plugs throughout your house, totaling up the amounts spent each month. However, it appears to lack the robust logging technology some users may require. For instance, Extech’s EM100 has a SD card slot for exporting months worth of data, and comes with analysis software.

Available August/September for a MSRP of $80.

A display that can receive up to eight discrete wireless signals? I’d love to see what hardware hackers will do with this baby.

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5 Responses to Alt.CES: Oregon Scientific's wireless energy monitor

Dave Bell on January 6th, 2010 at 11:41 am said:

At $80, plus unknown extra per “plug”, it’s not all that competitive with Kill-A-Watt or the Tweetified hack.

With all the hacking of the basic KaW being published, there’s one thing I would like to see: An external clamp-on current probe input. The KaW would still need to be plugged in, in order to capture the voltage signal (and into the same power line phase as the line being monitored). This would allow monitoring of hard-wired equipment or circuits with multiple distributed loads.

Anyone have ideas for a reasonably-priced split core current probe, that could be jacked into a KaW in place of R17 and its signal conditioning?

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- Anonymous on January 6th, 2010 at 12:52 pm said:
  
  These meters use a clamp (usually to do the whole house) – they do (sometimes) sell the individual clamps to allow you to do 2 and 3 phase. Though the base station has an xml stream coming out over serial already.
  
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Anonymous on January 6th, 2010 at 12:53 pm said:

opps – forgot the link.. http://www.currentcost.com/products.html

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- Dave on January 10th, 2010 at 9:28 pm said:
  
  Re: http://www.currentcost.com/products.html
  
  Hmm. Nice product line! I do like the clamp-on transmitter. I don’t see any prices, though. That’s not a *good* sign…
  
  Thanks!
  
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Digital Clamp Meter on March 8th, 2011 at 10:07 am said:

I’m so love this blog, already bookmarked it! Thanks.

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