Hi!

I was going to put in a detailed description of how to set up the Current Cost Envi in your home but it looks like their website (and other 3rd party sites) have it pretty well described already.  To make things easier though, I’ll include links here to those useful sites… and add my own personal comments on how I did it in my home.

  • Current Cost Site – Installation video. Pretty good overview of what you’ll need to do.  Please note the warnings about dealing with dangerous levels of electricity when installing the transmitter/monitor part!  (See more comments below)
  • YouTube video by SRE showing main installation steps.
  • Another installation video in YouTube but using the TED (The Energy Detective) product. Very similar in terms of steps though.

So, basically, it’s a straightforward installation as long as you are very careful and know what you are doing.  If you have any doubts or concerns about doing this yourself, then get a licensed electrician to do this for you. I did do just that by asking a friend to do this for me even though I pretty much knew what he was going to do.

The funny thing is that it was a good idea to let him do that because I would have removed the wrong screws from my mains panel! (There were two screws in the inner panel and 6 screws in the outer panel… found out that the outer screws were the ones to remove.. If I removed the inner panel screws, I would have removed the panel front from the sides and would probably have loosened some wires that I shouldn’t have).

Installed Current Cost Envi

Installed Current Cost Envi

Once that was done though, it was an easy thing to clamp the two main wires of the Envi to the main lines coming into the house (instructions that come with the Envi do a pretty good job at explaining where to clamp).  Once clamped and the monitor positioned properly so that it doesn’t touch any other components or wires in the panel, we covered the panel again and screwed the screws back in.

I was a bit worried that the monitor and the receiver wouldn’t be able to connect because my mains panel was in the basement and my receiver was in the first floor in the living room but I had no problems whatsoever with the monitoring of the electricity usage.  In a few seconds, I could see right away a nearly real-time view of electricity use of my whole house!

So far, it’s been pretty stable (It has been running for more than a month now) and the data is getting pretty useful to track trends and usage patterns with different time frames (days, weeks, months).

A good tip is really to put your receiver in a place where you can easily see it (your bedroom side table, the living room, the kitchen?)… and, if you plan to use the Google PowerMonitor, you’ll need to place it near your PC or laptop that’s on the whole time.  This is because you’ll need to connect the Envi receiver to your PC (via a USB port) to be able to send usage data to Google’s site.

In my case, I already had a laptop running the whole day connected to my Internet connect for my MagicJack voip phone. (I use this instead of a land line since it costs a lot less). So, all I had to do is plug in the Envi and install the Current Cost monitoring software and that was it!  (More on this in the next post).

As a final comment, some of you may find it funny to keep a laptop on the whole time since that uses up electricity right?  Well, that is true but that is the reason why I use a laptop instead of a full PC… using the Kill-a-watt monitor, my laptop uses only about 15 – 20 watts.  I also close the cover when i’m not in front of it using it use so the wattage is much lower because the LCD screen uses a lot of power (relatively).  Using a PC would probably take 3-4 times that amount of watts.

Hope you find this info useful for your own setups!

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