Anybody know anything about home energy monitoring?

[Robinhood4x4]

I've been thinking about getting a Kill-a-watt to see how much electricity I'm using, but being the geek I am, it sure would be nice if it could monitor over time and output a graph. But of course, it would be even nicer if it would just log the data and then output it to excel where I can do even more with the numbers.

So anybody know anything about these things?

[paddlenbike]

I don't have anything that fancy, but I do use one of these:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31GQyDER3CL.jpg

LINK (http://www.bluelineinnovations.com/)

I like it because it tells me my whole-house instantaneous power draw in killowatts and cents or sometimes dollars per hours of electricity I am using. You give it the cost of each tier of electricity in your area--so for example, it knows to charge the first 500kw at a rate of 10.1 cents per killowatt, then 11.2 cents/kw for the next 500 kw, then 13.3 cents/kw after that based on my utility's rates. It will also do time-of-use.

It is pretty accurate too. My house has a baseload of 300 watts minimum all of the time; when I turn on my 1500 watt space heater the monitor shows I have 1800 watts of useage. Same is true for my 3500 watt central AC, my baseload goes from 300 watts to 3800 watts, so I know it's accurate.

The meter provides a running dollar amount for how much I have spent on electricity that month. It helps me conserve and run the AC less when I see how much it actually costs to run it.

If you look at the company's website, they have far fancier tools that will let you look at your instantaneous use over the internet or your smartphone. Honestly, I don't see the need. I know what each of the big ticket items in my house pulls for electricity (a/c, spa, etc.), and since I am unable to kick off my A/C remotely anyway, remote monitoring does me no good.

If you have any questions, ask away.

[4x4mike]

Whoops Steve, I answered in the wrong forum.

I think you'll get what you need from the unit shown above. PG&E also has a lot of useful tools as discussed other places, but maybe your provider has something.