ted, this case is closed

I've been excited about receiving a TED 1001 home energy meters for two weeks now. I downloaded and skimmed through the TED manual to see what the installation requirements were. I Googled online forums to learn how I might connect the TED display unit to my home Linux server and archive energy data. On Thursday, I received a new TED on loan that I could use for the energy efficiency experiment I had in mind. Even better - with the Victoria Day long weekend, I figured I had plenty of time to install the metering unit and test out communications over the power lines to the display unit.

Then I opened my electrical panel and found this:



The main service conductors come into the panel from the top left, just below the yellow sticker. These bad boys are thick and sturdy, and placed far too close together for me to get the CTs clamped on. Better yet, I can't de-energize these cables in order to feed them through the CTs - that would have to be done on the BC Hydro side of the circuit.

So that's it - the monitoring experiment case is closed. BC Hydro does offer reasonable historical billing data, however, so I may still grab coincident weather data and run a quick model to check the efficiency of my home. The TED will be passed on to some lucky colleague at work to play with - I hope their electrical panel is easier to work with than mine!

wireless power

An MIT professor presented an interesting paper at an American Institute of Physics forum this week: a description of a method to wirelessly transmit power to mobile devices. Unlike existing approaches that use inductive coupling (and normally require devices to be quite close together), this approach makes use of resonance and devices can be several metres apart.

More details are available in this MIT news release, and the paper describing the theory involved is available here.