I learned that the radiant heat in the bathroom floor used very little electricity compared to heavy-hitter circuits like hot water, so it wasn’t worth adjusting the thermostat schedules and give up comfort.

We use it to keep an eye on how much energy we use for grow lights in the greenhouse.

As a bonus, the electricity usage of the well pump is a proxy for water level in the well.

I track my usage with the tesla powerwall unofficial api and have since learned not to worry about my fridge, it's my dryer that really eats up all the power (and my furnace fan). Also realized leaving my lights on vs off doesn't change my usage at all so I'm not worried about turning them off like I used to.

Beauty of leds lighting I assume?

The real cost comes from when they're on for too long, generating a lot of sustained heat, or when the DC power supply stops working. Would love for PoE-based lights to take off for residential use but that's probably a pipe dream.

Yea the only issue I have with led is some are really finicky with frequency changes. The ones in my kitchen will flicker when the power wall is full. I haven’t gotten around to asking Tesla to adjust the frequency though.

Hmm haven't run into that problem. How frequent does that happen?

Ubiquity is bullish on PoE lighting.

I used to work on the home energy monitoring space a decade ago. The most useful thing I ever heard of as a result of home electricity monitoring is that someone found a 100-W bulb that was always on.

If you have it connected to a major electricity consuming appliance, like a refrigerator, an electric dryer, or a furnace (whose fans use a ton of electricity), then in theory you can see any degradation in efficiency over time which may indicate that they need repairs. I doubt most people will do that.

For example, I'm pretty nerdy about energy use, and it took me 2 years to notice that the output of my house PV system had reduced 30% because of some trees that had grown taller.

Also, in the future, this sort of monitoring will likely be built into the appliances themselves.

There are also easier ways to achieve something like this, for example kill-a-watt meters.

every day usage: If you also have a PV system you can decide when to run the dish washer, laundry machine, dryer, ... and how many of these "bursty" appliances can possibly run in parallel w/o consuming energy from the grid

analysis/optimize energy consumption, e.g.:

* we moved the freezer from the kitchen to the basement instead of buying a more energy efficient new one

* the pump in our (20yrs old) heating system constantly uses 60W -> the whole furnace is now due for replacement

* determine your electricity base load in order to make an informed decision about the capacity of a battery system that buffers energy demand during the times the PV system does not supply energy

I'd say the real value is in looking into long term patterns (no ML needed).

I don't know about residential. Seems mostly to be a plaything.

But there is big potential for this in industrial settings. Imagine being able to monitor machine uptime around the clock by sensing amperage usage.

Tracking cycle time by counting cyclic spikes in current and putting it on a live dashboard.

Detecting motor degradation by sensing increases in amperage required over time.

Calculating energy consumption per pound of commodity part produced.

Like many people, our house is on a time-of-use plan. This kind of monitoring is useful to determine if there are loads that could be cheaper to shift to a different time of day.

This is for the same kind of people who record their heart rate every minute for their entire lifetime... And then proceed to do nothing with the mostly-useless data.