I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me.
"Worse, participants who reported taking the most steps toward energy conservation had the least accurate perceptions of which ones saved the most energy."
That's a killer quote right there. I think bad newspaper science is to blame, there's too many articles printed on "do X to save energy NOW", without putting them in perspective, and only reinforcing some sort of feel-good effect in the readers.
The only thing that will work is cold hard measurements, and lots and lots of education.
I'd love to get appliance by appliance data of where my house's energy is going. I've got a Killawatt, but that only helps for 120v appliances with plugs, and that doesn't include the in wall electric squirrel cage heaters (x6, on 240v) or the Hot Water heater, or the Oven/Stove, or the dryer. PSE, the local energy co, is supposed to have 5 minute lag time electric meters, but they've never been able to show me any data from them.
I have found out that my free, spare, energy guzzling fridge that's stored in the garage costs $5 a month to run in the summer. I was expecting way worse than that.
Google was supposed to have some sort of thingy that went on the electric meter, but searching for it is failing me now. If I had real time use data, even for the house as a whole, I could probably back out what's taking the monster share of the load. (especially if I went around killing things at the breaker).
Agreed, the only problem with these devices as I see it is that they themselves consume energy. Also I suspect the output is not so fun / worthwhile. Perhaps it can help people to tweak their refrigerators a couple of degrees but then again, the only real weapon against electricity overuse is pricing.
What we "need" is a carbon tax, I do not like people telling me I cannot use electricity in whatever quantities I feel like. I will however respect the fact that said electricity cant be had for free.
