The Kill-a-Watt Killer: Energy Monitors should be 10 times cheaper.

In my last post I reported that Google is creating a software tool called Google PowerMeter that will organize data from existing energy monitors like the popular Kill-A-Watt shown here.

The Kill-O-Watt costs about $30 to monitor each socket to tell you how much power each appliance is using.  But with Google’s application, these devices should look very different.  They should be so small you don’t see them and they should be ten times cheaper.  How? Ditch the entire interface – buttons, screen and all.  Why would you want each of these to be programmable with an old-school crappy interface?  And why would you want to walk around your house to look at the display screen of each of these devices (which is probably inconveniently behind your bookshelf)?  Maybe the next generation device looks like this.

That is, it doesn’t look like anything – It’s completely built into the wall socket-cover so you don’t see anything at all.  These devices should be cheap simple sensors that transmit a signal to a central hub.*  You would read all the data from Google as simply as checking your google calender.   In my socket-cover version, the sensors are simple EMF sensors.  An algorithm cancels out neighboring stray signals to get a plenty accurate reading of how active each socket is.

A device like this would mean that any home user could cheaply track every device around their home.

AND!  To take it one step further, circuit breakers could be built into the socket so that you could power things on and off from your computer.  Yes, you could even turn your appliances on and off from your iphone.

*The hub could be your home wireless network, or (if you aren’t wired) it could be a simple USB or ethernet device that picked up ultra-sonic frequencies from the sensors (like the remote key-entry on your car keys)