Review by Don Treply:

This is a gadget for the ‘tron-head but any home-owner or renter can use it too. You strap on one piece to the glass case power meter outside aligning the sensor to the little wheel that goes roundy and the remote receiving unit goes inside 50 to 100 feet from the meter. Then it tells you current consumption rate, amount used since last reset and differential use if you turn on or off a high watt power sponge, like your electric dryer or water heater or baseboard heater or the power strip feeding all your computer gadgets. So you know how green you really are. And you don’t have to keep track of those pesky arrows and numbers on the meter outside, this tells you digitally what your ‘lectricity footprint is. Easy interface and setup.

Took me 1/2 an hour to setup and learn what I was looking at. The freebie is you get a thermometer reading on the sensor so you know if your meter is chilly or hot and sunny.

Review by Chris R. Rowland:

We used this product for about six months to monitor power usage and then forgot about it for a few months. When I pulled it out of the closet to get it running again I found that the sensor (the sensor is installed outside on the meter) batteries needed to be replaced–no big deal. While I replaced the sensor batteries I found that moisture had gotten inside the battery compartment and the sensor no longer worked–one month after the one year warranty ran out. I don’t know about anyone else but I am really sick and tired of buying electronics/appliances that don’t last. One year of use is unacceptable. Blue Line Innovations would not replace this sensor since it was out of warranty. It is a neat idea poorly executed.

Blue Line Innovations PowerCost Monitor, Model# BLI-28000

PowerCost Monitor

Black & Decker EM100B Energy Saver Series Power Monitor

Review by Mike Jalkut:

When I first tried to set up the PowerCost Monitor I had some difficulty. But with the OUTSTANDING support from Blue Line Innovations it is finally working. I can see where some folks have given less than glowing reviews. Without understanding how the system works, it would have been easy to give up.

First of all, I had a hybrid meter, the m200 or something, which has a digital display and an infrared eye which reflect an actual internal old-fashioned wheel. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get it to work. I tried reading the infrared as well as reading the actual wheel from the top. Nothing.

So I emailed BlueLine, received almost an immediate reply . . . and they went out of their way to help. They had me send a photo of my meter. And they helped me try everything in the book to get it to work. Still nothing. We were both about to give up.

And then a thought occurred (a rare event for me). The plastic housing on my PG&E meter was decades old and showed it. The years of weathering had made it difficult to read even the big digital numbers through the housing. I suggested I call PG&E to have it replaced. Three days later I had a shiny new PG&E meter, but a different model. This one only had the digital readout and an infrared eye. The wheel was completely enclosed. And the worst part — it was bigger around, soo big that the metal strap on the sending unit could no longer reach all the way around it to fasten the unit to the meter.

A trip to the hardware store fixed the size problem. And then when I set up the sending unit to read the infrared readout, lo and behold, it worked. And the wheel simulator on the receiving display matched time with the wheel simulator on the meter.

The monitor has now been working for 24 hours and accurately shows rises and falls as expected when appliances are turned on and off, but with about a 30 second delay due to the communication protocol of the system. And my wifi indicator bars read a constant 5 bars at about 60 feet from the sender, through 3 walls.

I have to say I would have given up on the system had it not been for the helpful guidance of BlueLine support. I had some misconceptions of how I thought the mechanism worked which were cleared up by understanding. I would say that some of theses tidbits of information might have been spelled out more clearly in the documentation. But the helpful folks at BlueLine more than overshadowed this.

I am listing my misconceptions and enlightenments here in case they are helpful to anyone.

1) Just because a meter has a digital readout does not guarantee it is a digital meter. Mine was a hybrid. This is important when setting the multiplication factor of the system. Mechanical meters typically have a 7.2 multiplication factor which is indicated on the front of the meter. Pure digital meters have a factor of 1. When in doubt use the factor marked on the actual meter.

2) If at first the wifi indicator shows little or no strength, don’t panic. If the ID process worked, the sender and receiver are linked. After I brought my display unit inside, it read 0 bars. It took about 3 minutes before the strength gradually increased to 5 bars. I don’t know if it helps or not, but I set my display on a table and did not move it for those initial minutes. This delay is due to the communication protocol of the system.

3) The system’s wifi protocol is limited by the FCC to a periodic burst. It does not continually broadcast like a computer wifi or cellphone. This is why it takes a while for the signal strength indicator to show full strength. This is also why it does not seem to respond immediately when you turn on the oven. Every 30 seconds or so (i think) it broadcasts the accumulated stats it has collected over the preceding period. Once everything is stable, it works fine. But without understanding this delay, it is easy to conclude the thing isn’t working, has bad reception, and doesn’t display accurately.

4) Make sure your meter housing is clean and not worn by years of weathering. Make sure the infrared eye is clean on meters where the signal is brought out to the outside of the housing.

I admit I have only had it working for a day now, and I may change my tune after a month or a year. And I can understand where some would be ready to send the thing back after tinkering for a few hours. But with understanding of how it works, and patience, it does work and is very revealing of how much energy we are wasting. I hope my experience can help.

Mike Jalkut

Review by Jon Wojan:

I got one of these units for Christmas and hooked it up and used it for a couple of months. The unit is excellent for evaluating the cumulative and individual usage of devices around the home as well as trending and seeing the impact of various energy saving techniques such as replacing incandescent with CFLs, validating when someone has left a room without turning off the lights, turning off your computers at night and so on.

The base station takes 15-30 seconds to update a change in electrical consumption. This may be due to my use on my mechanical electrical box with the rotating metal wheel. Because in my install it counts the rotations of the wheel in the meter, it must monitor an entire rotation to note a change in speed, and thus the change in electrical consumption. This might be quicker on the newer electronic meters.

The unit does not automatically reset statistics at the start of a new month, which means you must do it manually if you want accurate month long statistics by staying up until Midnight on the last day of the month. If you do not do the resets the unit will continue accumulating statistics indefinitely, which makes it difficult to correlate the unit’s information to your electrical bills.

As others have noted, the communication to the unit is heavily dictated by the use of other wireless devices in your home. I have two other outdoor temprature sensors that run on the same frequency and this would produce situations where the unit would occasionally drop connection to the outdoor sensor. The only way to work around it is to move the base station closer to the outdoor sensor or move the the other wireless devices away from the area.

The other drawback about losing the connection to the outside unit is that the statistics stop accumulating, so if the sensor falls out of range overnight, its possible to lose hours of data and the month’s statistics are essentially useless as they will be incomplete.

This means that at best the unit is helpful in point in time assessments of energy consumption and has limited usefulness in trending usage over periods longer than say a week or more.

The outdoor sensor has a very light silicon seal around the battery door designed to keep moisture out of the unit. The problem is the wire for the eye that monitors the rotation wheel passes through a rubber part that is at the top of the compartment at the location where the silicon gasket rests against the housing. The net result of this design is that it provides a location for water to enter the battery compartment which also contains an electric circuit board, and since the seams are all at the top it’s a natural location for water to pool and gravity to assist it in penetrating the compartment over time. This is exactly what happened to my unit, and within 2 months the silicon portal for the communication LED showed signs of water in the compartment. After having an increasing inability to maintain communication to the base station, I pulled the batteries and let the unit dry out on a warm dry day. I put new batteries in the unit and then closed it back up, but the electronics were apparently damaged by the moisture.

Blue Line Innovations, the maker of the device has a support number that you can call, but the RMA process is different from any other company I have worked with. Apparently the support personnel cannot provide you with RMA information, nor can they directly transfer you to a live person to talk to about getting replacement sensors or getting repairs done, it’s a callback model only.

I have been waiting for a callback for over 2 weeks now and I have made calls into the support center on 3 different occasions to try and move the return/replacement process forward and each time I am told that all they can do is forward the information to corporate and that I will just have to wait for the phone call back.

So, the net result is unless you can get this unit on a steep discount from your energy provider it’s not worth the retail value, also, if you live in a moist climate you might want to look at adding some additional shielding or silicon the door seals closed from the outside to prevent moisture from prematurely ending the life of the outdoor sensor.