Our Gt Barrier offgrid house uses 2 towel rails worth of power each day (4Kwh), but in our apartment in the city we use 13Kwh. That is 3 times more…. Is it the hot water, or the fridge, or the cooking? I just don’t know and that it annoys me. A friend of mine has tells me his power bill for a single parent and child is between $300 and $500 per month. They wonder if someone is stealing the power somehow.
On Gt Barrier we are running one of the first versions of the Gridspy which monitors and graphs total power, refrigerator power and the power used by our satellite system. But here in town I have not got such a system.
Why no monitoring system in the city? Well I will blame one of our distributors. He said the system on the Gt Barrier would be too expensive for many city people. So we sat and scratched our respective heads. Lots of data to store equals a PC in the house. But no, these days as we have the web. Hey we could dump the PC and put the data directly onto a high speed server online. This means low cost power monitoring. From this version 2 is being born. This has been named the Nexus.
Soon the prototype Nexus will be monitoring the power in the city apartment. There will be extensive testing by many critical friends and family. So many people have put their hands up for testing they will have to be rationed out. It is an exciting time to have a product that so many people want to get their hands on, and finally I will have the tools to answer the question “Where does all the power go?
