How to Set Up a Smart Home Energy Monitoring System: A Beginner’s Guide

 

Photo credit: Image generated by OpenAI's DALL·E.

Setting up a smart home energy monitoring system is one of the most practical steps you can take to manage your household energy consumption. With rising energy costs and a growing need for sustainability, more homeowners are seeking ways to reduce their utility bills while minimizing their carbon footprint. Innovative energy monitoring systems provide detailed information on how, when, and where energy is consumed to make empowered choices about waste reduction, optimizing consumption, and ways to save money. Due to the dramatic fluctuation of energy consumption and prices from state to state, intelligent energy management systems can offer savings in each case.

 

The first step in setting up a smart home energy monitoring system is understanding what it does. Fundamentally, a smart energy monitor tracks the flow of electricity through your home appliances. It often gives you live data about your usage patterns through a smartphone app or dedicated dashboard. Today's systems can also present energy usage information specific to appliances or even areas of your home, providing detailed insights into the devices that consume the most energy. Using the prior example, if an average household uses approximately 10,500 kWh of electricity per year in the U.S., looking into appliances that use more power than others may pay off.

 

The United States Energy Information Administration estimates an average monthly electric bill is about $135 in 2022. By adopting a smart home energy system, through observation and control of your energy use, you can save anywhere from 10% to 20%, depending on your habits and the kind of devices being used. Real-world examples show that through minor adjustments, such as simply turning off lights or electronic devices when they are not being used and changing the thermostat when one will be away from their home, a family who actively monitored their energy usage could save upwards of $200 or more per year.

 

The first decision you will have to make when setting up your system is whether to go with whole-home energy or plug-level monitors. Whole-home energy monitors are installed directly into your home's electrical panel. Examples include Sense or Emporia Vue. Devices like these monitor your home's overall energy usage. They can often identify specific appliances based on their electrical signatures, which may help point out areas where you can reduce consumption. For instance, one Ohio homeowner had a Sense monitor installed and discovered his older refrigerator was using roughly twice as much electricity as it should have, at an additional cost of $150 per year. When replaced with an Energy Star model, energy consumption decreased drastically.

 

Plug-level monitors, such as TP-Link Kasa or Wemo Insight, connect directly to specific outlets in order to monitor the devices plugged into them. These are perfect if you want to follow the energy consumption of a couple of particular devices, such as your TV, air conditioner, or computer. For instance, a family in New York monitored their home office equipment with plug-level monitors and discovered that a desktop computer kept running 24/7, costing them almost $60 annually. The simple action of setting it to power down during times when it wasn't in use cut the cost in half.

 

After choosing a type of system, the next step is installation. If you are installing a whole-home system, we recommend hiring an electrician to do the job. In that respect, devices like Sense or Emporia Vue are meant to be more or less easy to install. They involve working directly with your home's electrical panel, which is only safe if you know how it works. Most professional installations take less than an hour and generally cost between $100 and $200, depending on your location.

 

Plug-level monitors, however, can easily be set up by yourself. You plug the monitor into an outlet and connect it via your device that's plugged into the monitor to your Wi-Fi. Once you have it set up, you can immediately begin to understand your energy usage through its connected app. Most of those apps give you real-time information and historical usage patterns, so you can tell how much a device is using at any instant in time and over time. For example, one California homeowner used TP-Link's Kasa smart plug to monitor her space heater last winter; she learned it consumed nearly 400 kWh of electricity each month and increased her bill by $60. Because she could identify this energy vampire, she could switch to a more energy-efficient heating option and decrease her energy consumption by almost half.

 

Many intelligent energy monitoring systems have proper facilities for scheduling and creating alerts. For instance, if you notice that your air conditioner switches on when no one is home, you can create an alert to remind yourself to turn it off. Instead, you can operate high-power appliances like dishwashers and clothes dryers during off-peak periods when the price of electricity is minimal. Many utilities across the country have time-of-use pricing, where the amount they charge for electricity is based on when you use it. By using more high-power energy during low-demand periods, overall bills can be reduced quite a lot. For example, a Minnesota family said it programs its washing machine and dishwasher when electricity demand is low, which they estimate saves them $120 a year off their electric bill.

 

In addition to real-time monitoring and scheduling, some smart home energy systems can interface with other smart devices to automate your energy savings. In that respect, it can be connected to smart thermostats, like Nest or Ecobee, where turning the temperature off automatically at times when you're not home will further reduce energy consumption. In one instance, a Texas family integrated an intelligent energy monitor with a smart thermostat and lighting, shaving 15% off their energy usage during the hottest months of the year and saving nearly US$300 on an annual energy bill.

 

Data privacy and security considerations are also crucial when setting up a smart home energy monitoring system. Many of these devices are connected to your Wi-Fi and gather data on energy use patterns, so your system must be secure. That means solid passwords for your Wi-Fi network and all associated apps, plus keeping your system's firmware current to help protect against any security vulnerabilities. Most manufacturers offer full encryption and security capabilities for protecting your data, but it's always a good idea to check before buying.

 

Once your system is installed, you will get the most value from it by staying engaged with the data it provides. By regularly analyzing trends in your energy usage, try to find patterns that may identify places where you can dial back consumption. For example, the peak of energy consumption is in the evening. In that case, consider other sources of light that would save energy, or it might be practical to set the thermostat settings accordingly. If some of the appliances use more energy than expected, it would be worth upgrading to more efficient models.

 

In conclusion, An intelligent home energy monitoring system is a painless and low-cost method to control one's home energy consumption. Whether through whole-home systems or plug-level monitors, these devices add significant insight into energy usage patterns, enabling informed decisions that will translate into substantial savings for you. Intelligent energy monitors can cut your energy costs yearly by up to 10% to 20%, often paying for an investment in record time. Real-world examples from all over the U.S. show how such systems can save homeowners hundreds of dollars yearly while reducing their carbon footprint. Take a proactive approach to energy management: lower utility bills and contribute toward a greener future.