TED 5000 is installed! It's alive!

TED 5000 Home Energy Monitor Efficiency Smart Meter Grid

TED 5000 opened

In the future, when the smart grid is finally here, every home will have a smart meter. But the future is a long ways off, so there is no sense in waiting. Energy, Inc., the manufacturers of The Energy Detective and the TED 5000 announced on Tuesday, June 30th that the TED 5000 was ready to order. Well, my TED 5000 came by FedEx today and I had it installed and running in around an hour. While I have only had it a few hours, I am very impressed. While I have already covered the TED 5000 once in my post announcing its release date and some off its features, this will be an overview of some of the first things that have caught my attention.

The TED 5000 installs much the same way that the TED 1000 does. I really dont want to cover installation that much because if done wrong, it can be dangerous. While I'm not an electrician, I do have a decent amount of knowledge around electrical equipment, so I felt comfortable installing it. The biggest thing is to ensure the main breaker is turned off so no electricity is in the panel. But please don't take this blog post as installation instruction. There are good installation instructions, getting started guide, and instruction manual that comes with the unit, but if you aren't that comfortable around electrical equipment call an electrician. If the electrician is competent he will be done in under 30 minutes as it is not hard at all for someone who knows what they are doing.

Display Unit

I purchased the TED 5000-C, which is the model that comes with the Display Unit. You can purchase the TED 5000-G which does not come with a display unit and you would just access the data through your computer. I think the display unit is very cool, so I paid the extra $40 bucks and got it. The total amount I paid was $239.95 before taxes and shipping. When I opened the TED 5000 there were three smaller packages containing:

MTU - this comes with the current transformers (CTs) and wires and installs in your breaker panel. It sends data to the...
Gateway - This is plugged in an electrical outlet by your computer. It receives signals from the MTU over your home's wiring. It then sends data over an Ethernet cable to your router or directly to a computer. It can also send data wirelessly (ZigBee) to the ....
Display unit - This is an option but I highly recommend it. It plugs into the wall for power but gets its data from the Gateway over a wireless connection. It looks like a big silver Ipod video.

Aside from separating the Gateway and the Display unit, the biggest change with the TED 5000 is the Footprints Software. They have done an amazing job with this. Unlike the TED 1000, which sold the software as separate and came on a disc, the TED 5000 includes the software in the price, but the software is retrieved directly from the Gateway, meaning there is no installation necessary. You simply have to type "ted5000" in the internet address bar to access the software after the Gateway is connecting to your network. (see screen shot of software on my computer at the end of the post)

Initial configuration is all done through a set-up wizard. I did notice one error in the "Quick Start Guide" when setting up the software. The guide instructs you to start from the "Setup Menu", but they must have made a revision, because there is no "Setup Menu". You have to go to "Edit --> System Wizard Setting". From there it is very straightforward.

The guide highly recommends plugging the Ethernet cable that comes out of the Gateway into a router, and not directly into a computer. I would also recommend this because it makes things much simpler. The beauty of having the software reside on the Gateway is that as long as the Gateway is connected to your home router, you will be access the data from any computer on your home network! I had to do this because my laptop is wireless and I use a VPN to get on my work network. When I tried to access the TED 5000 software while on the VPN, I had trouble connecting. When I booted up the desktop, which is not wireless, I was able to access the software right away. This is the beauty of having the software reside on the Gateway and connecting the Gateway to the router!

Energy, Inc. has definitely beefed up the footprints software and it is much more intuitive and helpful. There are many, many features. The biggest of which is that you can EXPORT THE DATA! If you recall, this is why I returned my TED 1000 unit. The Gateway unit has internal memory that stores the data (up to 90 days of hourly data, 24 months of daily data, and 10 years of monthly data). The TED 1000 had no internal memory so it had no way to store and export the data unless you used your computer for that function. Since the Gateway has internal memory it can store data when your computer is off. This is great for seeing how your house uses energy while you sleep or when you are on vacation.

Exporting the data is vey simple and the data is exported in a .CSV format so you can easily view it in Excel.

Finally, another great feature is that the Footprints software has a widget that displays your local weather. All you have to do is tell it your zip code. Now, my only suggestion for Energy, Inc. is that they store the average temperatures and export those values with the energy data. This way, you can see how the local weather is affecting your energy consumption and track those changes over the season.

Overall, the TED 5000 has been greatly improved and is one of the best tools I can think of to get control over your electricity consumption. Much more to come in the following weeks!

***Update - 8/18/09 - The TED 5000 iPhone app has been released and is available in the app store. Check out my review here: TED 5000 iPhone app

***Update - 9/13/09 - See what kind of stuff you can do with the TED 5000 data once you have it installed in my latest blog on outside temperature impacts on energy consumption.

***Update - 10/07/09 - Several comments have noted you can't purchase the TED 5000 from Energy, Inc.'s website, but that has now changed and they do list them for sale and purchase online at the TED 5000 store. Click here to buy a TED 5000.

Footprints Screenshot

The below update is no longer viable since Google has shut down PowerMeter.

***Update 10/6/09 - Google has announced they are working with the TED 5000 as a device partner for their Google Power Meter software. Follow the link above to learn about it and to update your firmware. This is pretty big news and will no doubt send sales of the TED 5000 through the roof! I spoke with TED customer service and they said that if you already own a TED 5000, the Google Power Meter software update will be on their site on Friday, 10/9/09. If you don't already own a TED 5000 but buy a new one, the new unit will ship with the Google Power Meter software. I'm looking forward to seeing if the Google Power Meter software will have many advantages over their Footprints software!

Tags:

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ZigBee

Comments

Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/25/2010 - 09:03

After reading the comments about the energy detective customer support, I decided to forgo emailing them my question and just post it on here. Is the TED 5000 compatibale with Mac computers or do I have to run it on a PC?

Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 10/17/2009 - 11:59

huge design flaw in TED.. If you have co-generation. No way around this unless they change their code. They don't take into account the direction of the current flow in the CT's. The CT's know which way the current is flowing because I can see the MTD numbers going forward and backward but when they reach zero there is no negative sign so there is no way to tell if the current is still going backward or forward. Even if you buy the 5000-SG it still will not work. The arithmatic can not be done unless you know if its negative or positive. You HAVE to know if the meter is going forward or reverse. If the Daily power gets to zero you have to know if its still going backwards or if its going forward. So as of now if you have geration that produces more than you use in a day TED readings will not be acurate.

Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 10/17/2009 - 09:00

First off... I find it so ANNOYING that TED site has email that it seems no one monitors.... I have a solar array and I track what is coming in from it. I also display the TED5000 data using the API. What I notice is that during the day I can see the TED5000 usage going backwards but when it hits zero it does not post a negative in front of the number. I sent an email asking if there was anyway to get this negative symbol added so that you can truly see when total power is negative. I have to do some assuming to display whether its negative or not. Thanks in advance, Adam

Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/19/2010 - 23:13

One more thing....Isn't the <a href="http://www.gogreensolar.com/products/the-energy-detective-ted-5000-c" rel="nofollow">TED 5000 C.</a> compatible with both Macs and Linux? I think these are two os that the TED 1000 wasn't compatible with.

Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/07/2009 - 18:27

Looks like access to the software from Google is still restricted. Does anyone have a copy yet?

Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/07/2009 - 18:34

The TED people told me it wont be up on their website for download until Friday. But if you ordered a TED recently it will probably ship with the new software. I still dont know if this new software will somehow get past some of the firewall issues?

Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/07/2009 - 18:38

Actually, I was wondering about the other side of the equation, the Google side. Their software doesn't seem to be available yet, except to a limited few.

Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/07/2009 - 16:01

Possible tip for isolating PLC signals from existing X10 signals. My newer home has one Arc-Fault breaker to supply bedroom outlets only. It seems to completely isolate X10 signals from other circuits. I would expect using such a breaker for the MTU & gateway would be similar to using an X10 noise filter, with cleaner wiring. But, such breakers are admittedly expensive.

Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/30/2009 - 16:01

My MTU just died on my 5000, no lights at all anymore on the MTU, it was about 2 months old, I had not even attempted to update it yet. I am very annoyed that they do not appear to answer or monitor emails, you appear to have to call about anything that goes wrong. Guys: If you put a support email address on your website you should probably monitor it... While it worked it worked decent, it does screw up X10 completely...having it running randomly (usually within an hour or less) turns on *ALL* of my X10 controlled lights, if I turn them off, they will be back on in under an hour...

Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/13/2009 - 07:24

Well I finally received my TED5000-SC last Friday and got it hooked up in no time. My PV system is not fully hooked up yet so I am not running the solar side of things yet. However, I did run into a problem getting to the Gateway via the browser due to being a Mac user, but I got that figured out, thanks to this support blog, and I am on my way. I have seem some strange readings though. Maybe someone can explain: 1) My readings are in a constant state of change. Jumping 5-10W every display reading update (every 2 sec) even though nothing is changing in the house. 2) It seems to read low wattage... like it shows 68W when I know i have at least 200W or more running. 3) The readings sometimes drops to zero watts which is impossible! But if I start a kettle or something, it does jump to 1300W, but when the kettle kicks off, it takes sometimes 10 seconds or more to show that. I am not sure if this is an indicator that one of the CT's are miss marked and needs to be flipped? But i know that I am reading quite low most of the time. (138W for full house load even with 6x 23W CFL bulbs and 5 x 50W halogens running + all phantom loads) Any suggestions?

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