Although I had very little positive to say about the TED 5000 with my last review, after looking at the alternatives, I couldn’t really find anything that matched it’s capability without being the eMonitor (which costs at least 5x as much, and has a subscription fee!). While there are some competitors (one clamps to your meter outside, and a couple use current clamps), none of those also wire into your electrical system to provide actual voltage readings (and therefore power factor). I did get one company to offer a review unit (which I could return if I didn’t like it, or buy for a discount if I did), but it too didn’t provide voltage information, but it also didn’t use Power Line Communication (PLC), so it avoided those issue).
So, knowing that TED (the company) wasn’t going to provide me with a review unit I swallowed my pride, and mailed off a check for the refurbished unit they had offered before.
Another year is done, with 2011 behind us, and another year worth of power data (and for this year, I think I’ll throw in some gas usage data as well in the next post) to look at, and figure out what went well, bad, etc. Of note is that while this year is also a