TED 5000 and Google PowerMeter on iGoogle is Live

Google PowerMeter iGoogle

I was thrilled when I learned Google PowerMeter and TED 5000 were going to be teaming up to bring me my energy consumption on my iGoogle page. I have had the TED 5000 installed since July and I just installed my TED 5000 updates and I have the power meter running on my iGoogle! Unfortunately, unless you have a TED 5000 or have a utility that has teamed up with Google PowerMeter then you can't get this nifty widget. So buy the TED 5000 or bug your utility!

After you have the updates installed for the TED you can log in to Footprints (the TED 5000 software) and go to "Edit --> Activate Google PowerMeter". You will have to have a Google account to access the iGoogle page. If you are already logged into your Google account then it should be smooth sailing from this point.

Activate Google Power Meter

The widget appeared very quickly, but it did take a few minutes for the initial data to start appearing. Be calm while the data uploads! It looks like the update rate of the data is every 10 mins.

My favorite feature is using my iPhone to pull up iGoogle and view the Google PowerMeter widget! I currently have the TED 5000 iPhone app but I have to be in my home and connected to the network. With the iGoogle PowerMeter Widget, I can access the TED 5000 data from anywhere I have a phone connection!

Google Power meter TED 5000 data on iPhone

You can also enlarge the PowerMeter widget so you can get a better view of the data. I like the "Compared to other" bar at the bottom so you can see how your home is performing. It looks bare on mine right now only because it has just been installed.

**Update - 10/28/09 - I removed the old data picture from when I initially had it up and running and I've updated the picture now that I have more data. Below is the expanded data you get when you click on the PowerMeter in iGoogle. Google recently added an "expected usage" bar at the very bottom. The spikes that occur are at night when we get home from work and in the morning when we're getting ready.

Google PowerMeter Expanded

I'm signing off now to go experiment with the Google PowerMeter and let it gather some more data. I'll update this post with more information soon...

I've had a few weeks to play with this, and I am pretty excited. If you save your iGoogle page as a bookmark on your iPhone you can pull it up and show people the PowerMeter and show them your home's energy usage in real time. I use it to demonstrate the power of home energy monitoring.

Tags:

Google power meter iGoogle

Google power meter iphone

PowerMeter

ted 5000

TED 5000 iphone app

Comments

Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/13/2009 - 13:36

Is there a way to view your Google PowerMeter via a mobile device (Palm Pre)?

Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/13/2009 - 12:58

How do you do that?

Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/07/2010 - 23:04

I wrote a perl script to do it via the TED 5000 API. <a href="http://blog.jasongarland.com/2010/01/twitter-update-you-energy-usage-using.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jasongarland.com/2010/01/twitter-update-you-energy-usage-using.html</A>

Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 10/10/2009 - 19:31

I found out about "The Energy Detective" just after I installed solar panels (November 2006) and was looking for a way to measure net consumption (I ran rs232 cables to the inverters to get data on solar production as soon as the install was complete). I was sad that TED couldn't handle a system that generated as well as used power. Now it can ... but I'm still sad because I've realized that it makes no financial sense to buy a TED5000 now. My net electricity bill for last year was only $289. This year it looks like it will be even lower. So there really isn't much hope that TED5000 will be able to find places where I can reduce my bill by enough to cover its cost. My inner-geek is crying because it looks like such a cool toy :-(

Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 10/11/2009 - 11:25

Do you only buy toys that cover their cost? If you want a TED to be able to demonstrate to others how efficient you are living your life, then I say it is worth it. Not everything has to have a payback. Good job on the low electricity bill, that is pretty amazing!

Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 10/11/2009 - 06:36

Tony, It certainly is a cool toy but I would suggest holding off until they work out the new metering/solar bugs. As of right now, if you already have a solar monitoring system, the TED5000 isn't worth it. I don't have monitoring of my inverters, installer wanted $1400, so the TED helps in that respect but the software isn't quite set up right for solar monitoring.

Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 10/24/2009 - 19:52

TED will be posting the SOLAR interface for TED 5000 this coming week (week of Oct 26). It is SLICK!

Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 11/01/2009 - 09:02

So where do we find this? Does it actually work? I am pretty fed up with my net metering data constantly switching between positive and negative. So far TED5000 is absolutely useless for solar.

Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/09/2009 - 06:48

Frankly the Google Power Meter is underwhelming. The software and graphing on the TED5000 web application is much richer. The failure to transfer the historic data is a major flaw. Not capturing the other data such as Power factor and voltage is another issue. Even things that google is usually good at like being able to identify the time of an individual bar in a bar chart by hovering over it has not been implemented. If I was a utility evaluating this software you would have to look to future promises. Looking forward to more work by Google to atleast catch up to the TED Footprints level of funtionality.

Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/09/2009 - 03:47

Jeff, How does Google PowerMeter work with solar panels. Is there two displays; 1 for consumption and 1 for production?

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