Household Electricity Consumption #
I’ve always liked the idea of being able to monitor home electricity consumption. The Economist tackles some of the possibilities, problems, and pitfalls of the available options.
In an ideal world, every home would have a smart meter. But they are not the sort of thing you can go out and buy—let alone install for yourself. Even if they were given away it would take years to replace the millions of existing meters around the world. So small, cheap devices like the Owl and the Wattson can be useful in the meantime. No doubt some of the novelty of monitoring your power consumption will wear off, but the evidence from fuel-efficiency gauges in cars suggests that when something clearly shows people how to save money, they will follow its advice.