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Home Energy Management: TED 5000 Provides Real Consumer Value – But Scores Low on Standards-Based Interoperability By Erich Gunther Jul 6, 2010 - 10:55:22 AM
. In SGN's Tech Take articles, power engineer and architect
After a short hiatus, I am pleased to begin a new series of Smart Grid technology reviews. I have been working to start up a new company called Smart Grid Labs (SGL) which will perform more formal evaluations of Smart Grid technologies than the informal reviews I do for these articles. In the future, I will be relying more on the SGL team to support these reviews.
Today’s article looks at a home energy monitor – The TED 5000 from The Energy Detective. Having accurate energy usage information – both real time and historical – is critical for a consumer to understand and manage their energy usage and cost. I have an extensive home automation system based on the HomeSeer system and I have been looking for an energy monitor to directly measure how well that system is helping with managing my energy use. After some research, I discovered the TED 5000 which looked like it would support my requirements based on the information on their web site.
The Impact of Customer Facing Systems and User Experience on the Smart Grid
The utility's traditional residential customer interface has been through monthly billings and the register value displayed on the outside of the electricity meter. Using only a bill and a meter register value, it is hard for residential electricity customers to make informed decisions about how products, services, and behaviors impact their monthly bill. Inevitably, emerging non flat rate structures lead to even more uncertainty by the account holder about when electricity was consumed, by whom, and using what device. Uncertainty about electricity consumption makes it harder for residential customers to modify their energy consumption behaviors under growing need for conservation and peak demand reduction.
As Internet-style convergence happens across the Smart Grid, the opportunity to upgrade the residential customer's user experience has arisen. In the future, Smart Grid applications may leverage any of two-way meter communications connections, resident-connected Internet connections, cell phone Internet connections or any other data access means to:
· Communicate and control utility assets such as the meter
· Communicate with the customer about their bill
· Communicate with the customer about how energy consumption impacts their bill
· Provide signals to customer-owned automation to act on utility need
· Engage the customer to take 'next steps’ towards being greener or meeting utility need
· Help the customer find the small change in lifestyle with big positive impact on the grid
· Involve customers in the process of energy efficiency
Where the Smart Grid meets the residential customer, several things are needed. The first is a set of ubiquitous modalities for communication with the customer. TV screens, web browsers, thermostat displays, special purpose displays, and cell phone interfaces are currently considered. Next, customer facing applications need to find a way to help residents meet energy awareness and conservation goals across the various points of interaction. Such systems also need a back end system that offer persistence of service across the residential customer's various presence and location oriented user interface requirements. Together, these form a scalable, coherent, user experience that offers more access and impact than any single means.
The Energy Detective Product Lineup
The Energy Detective (TED) has several devices that permit consumers to monitor their own energy consumption in real time, provide historical usage reports, and even provide a link to Google’s Power Meter energy portal. Further, my home automation system advertises support for TED. I selected the TED 5000 because unlike earlier versions, it did not require a separate software application running on a PC to operate. Instead it uses a hardware-based gateway that receives signals from the voltage and current sensors and makes the data available through a built-in web interface. Connection to the web interface is provided via a standard 10BaseT RJ-45 Ethernet connector. In addition, the TED 5000 gateway can establish a link to Google’s Power Meter portal web site to archive my data.
When I received the package, I found it easy to install the hardware. The instructions were concise and easy to follow (yes, although an engineer, I actually read the directions). I have two 200 amp electrical panels in my home so I purchased two sets of current/voltage sensor modules – one for each panel. The TED 5000 supports up to four such modules. Each module comes with two clamp-on CTs and leads to directly connect to each leg of my split phase, 120/240 volt service. The instructions were clear to ensure that I oriented the CTs correctly and make sure that power readings had the correct direction and sign (positive values for load).
The modules communicate with the gateway using a proprietary power line carrier (PLC) communications scheme. The modules inject the PLC signal using the voltage sensing connection at the panel and the gateway picks it up by being plugged into a wall outlet in the house. Using a proprietary approach breaks one of our core principles and is reflected in my score. The more significant practical problem, however, is that the PLC technology interferes with other PLC-based technology I have in my home and is also affected by the noise filters found in surge-protected electrical outlet strips and UPS systems – of which I have many in my home. Because of this, I was unable to get the system to work using my preferred placement of the gateway. After hours of experimenting with disconnecting outlet strips, moving the gateway from outlet to outlet, I finally found a combination that allowed the gateway to receive the PLC signal. After some measurements, I found that the major issue was associated with my outlet strips filtering out the PLC signal. I finally had to plug in the gateway in an outlet nearest the breaker panel. The problem with that is this location was nowhere near my home network. I solved this by using a HomePlug based PLC network connection device from NetGear plugged into the same outlet. It turns out that the HomePlug device does not interfere with my other home automation gear or the TED 5000 – network connection problem solved!
The next challenge was configuring the system. After fussing around a bit I figured out the IP address the gateway was assigned by my DHCP server. The actual setup was relatively simple using the embedded web interface on the gateway – I specified the serial numbers of the two sensor modules and the serial number of the separate LCD-based display device. I also had to tell it that I was using two modules in load mode. Getting this right allows me to select a NET mode on most displays that summed the module channels to give me total house power and energy.
Another nice feature was the ability to enter basic rate information so that my energy usage can be displayed in dollars rather than kWHrs – critical for my wife to actually get value from the system! The system supports a few basic rate types – more than sufficient to get a reasonable indication of energy costs. But you would never try to use it to compare your results with the utility bill. In my case, I have a flat rate ($0.07713 / kWHr) so the setup was easy.
As a side note, there is quite a bit of controversy on this particular point. Every vendor of in-home display devices for energy realizes that they need to provide an estimate of dollars spent rather than kWHrs used. However, efforts to create a simple method of supplying rate information for this purpose by the utility are being strongly resisted. The utilities are resistant to any idea of providing information used to estimate the rate and cost of consumption lest they be held accountable for that estimate when the consumer compares the output of their in-home display device from something like the TED 5000 and their actual bill at the end of the month. So what is happening is that the display vendors provide their own method of estimating and require the consumer to enter the rate data themselves. Like that’s going to be more accurate and less likely to cause calls to the utility!
Once the system is set up, there are a variety of display options on the embedded web interface as shown in Figure 1. The displays are easy to use, support views in both dollars and kWHrs, provide estimates of energy costs expected for a period if consumption pattern continues – just about anything you would want to know to understand your energy consumption and see the results of behavior changes to minimize it.
Where the TED 5000 Falls Short
The administrative portion of the interface provides a means to upgrade the firmware in the gateway and other components. You can download new firmware from their web site and specify the file locations in the web interface which then automatically distributes the firmware to the right components and restarts the system. There is very little feedback on this part of the process and I can’t tell if firmware ever gets updated in the remote sensor modules or the separate display device. In any case, even with the most recent firmware as of this writing, there are still a lot of bugs in the system – especially with the external wireless display monitor.
The system includes a ZigBee-connected wireless display monitor. No information is provided on what flavor of ZigBee is being used and I didn’t have the time to sniff it and reverse engineer the data stream. The radio link itself seems to work and no configuration was required other than telling the web interface on the gateway the serial number of the display device. However, the display is often inaccurate, it never displays anything other than zeroes for the min/max values on the various screens, it updates instantaneous kW readings sporadically – all of which reduce its usefulness. I only use the web interface.
I mentioned at the beginning that I have a HomeSeer based home automation system. I thought that it would support the TED device but it turns out that it only supports an older version. That was disappointing, but I hope a driver for the proprietary interface to the TED 5000 gateway will be developed. (Did you catch the word proprietary there?)
A really nice feature of the TED 5000 is its ability to send data to my Google PowerMeter account. Figure 2 shows a typical display of two days of consumption for one of my two panels – in this case the one with my air conditioning units on it. This is where there are more software bugs. The upload to Google is very unreliable. I had to go back many days before I found two days of consecutive data. The other problem is that Google PowerMeter does not provide a means to sum the two panels like the TED 5000 gateway web interface does. This would be a complaint about both the TED 5000 and Google PowerMeter. The TED 5000 should provide an option to upload an additional channel with the summation – or allow selection of what channels including net to upload. The Google PowerMeter portal should also provide an option for summation of multiple channels.
I mentioned earlier the problems with the proprietary PLC interface being impacted by outlet strip filters but I also noted interference with the operation of X10 and Insteon devices I have in my home – also proprietary although at least published PLC protocols. This issue really needs to be resolved before these technologies can be used by a mass market; it simply requires too much end user expertise to make it all work. It turns out that this is a focus on the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Priority Action Plan (PAP) No. 15 working group on PLC coexistence. Unfortunately, the focus is on broadband devices (like HomePlug) and not low-speed PLC such as that used by home automation systems. PAP 15 is also not looking at the impact of passive filtering devices such as outlet strips and UPS. This is a major problem that will prevent widespread adoption of these kinds of systems until addressed.
SGN’s Smart Grid Checklist:
The TED 5000 scores reasonably well on many of our metrics, but its use of proprietary technology in the communications results in low scores in those areas. .
GreenBox Technologies' Smart Grid Checklist scores -- total score of 74 (out of 100)
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Overall, we think this product is excellent in its ability to give a residential customer the information and understanding needed to remediate costly or environmentally unfriendly consumption behaviors. The score would be much higher with closer attention to standards-based interoperability and security. As the residential customer information economy emerges, expect to see consumers asking utilities to provide information direct from their smart meters rather than relying on the in-panel sensor modules.
EPRI IntelliGrid Architecture Web site
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