Ryland
Platinum Member
- Aug 9, 2001
- 2,810
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Shouldnt she be able to goto the state about the electric company price gouging her? Like calling http://www.puc.state.pa.us/ since she is in PA?
How about let's make sure that's actually the case, first.Shouldnt she be able to goto the state about the electric company price gouging her? Like calling http://www.puc.state.pa.us/ since she is in PA?
Have you been peering in on my basement again?![]()
TED devices aren't great, actually. If you look at the spec sheet for the Spyders, the design is terrible. Yes, I'm an electrical engineer, so my standards may be different, but the current transformers they chose and the associated analog to digital conversion have very poor tolerances. The unit also discards data way too quickly, which is ridiculous considering how cheap flash/storage is these days. I ended up designing my own with a raspberry pi and it is much more accurate with a reactjs interface that took a weekend to write.
I compared loads from 0.1 W to 1 kW in .1 W increments with my bench equipment, which is accurate to 0.02%. My version has an average tolerance of 1% with a maximum of 1.9% while TED is usually around 4% with a high of nearly 10%. The primary issue with TED is the minimum power draw requirement; if the wire is supplying less than 65 W of power, it will measure 0 W. This is a function of the current transformer's sensitivity and analog to digital converter in the MTU. I used a 12 bit A2D and a much higher quality CT, which set my minimum power draw to 4 W. Lower amounts of power will still be measured, but the accuracy suffers. Using solid core CTs helps quite a bit as well. I know they offer solid core CTs, but the ones I received with a TED Pro still performed poorly.
TED is fine if you want to know the rough power draw (100, 500, 1000, 10000 W), but I found it to be totally useless because of the accuracy and very poor historical data retention. It only reports data to the minute (some loads are seconds to 10s of seconds) and it only keeps the minute-based data for 25 hours. I've been reporting 36 CTs worth of data every 200 ms for eight months and I think the database is still under 200 MB. With a 32 GB flash card and a 2.5 GB OS footprint, it will record for longer than I will care before space runs out. If I get around to designing a custom board with a better A2D, I will probably put 32 GB of flash and an SD card slot for expansion to further trivialize this issue. Considering an SD card connector is $1, there's simply no excuse for this. Whoever designed TED seems to have no clue how to make a user-friendly piece of equipment.
You have a problem with the moderation? Make an MD thread. This is not going to be discussed in this thread.
esquared
Anandtech Forum Director
This happened to my mom recently. Had a big leak in a hot water pipe that went undetected....
Water heaters are often electric?Why would water has anything to do with electricity?
Or we let the experts who are paid to deal with things like this deal with it.How about let's make sure that's actually the case, first.
I'm sorry, I suppose I missed that proof that the utility has done something wrong here. I haven't seen anything to indicate that. She can't even clearly articulate what the problem is.Or we let the experts who are paid to deal with things like this deal with it.
The first thing the "experts" will ask is what exactly it is she's being charged for and, if she believes it to be erroneous, whether she's tried calling them to straighten it out yet herself. If the OP finally figured what's going on on her own, she hasn't bothered to mention it here, and unless I missed that too, she had not even called them yet, the last we heard.Or we let the experts who are paid to deal with things like this deal with it.
OK dump question, how do you post screenshots?If his electric company is reporting that he is using fewer KW/h a month does his meter really matter much at this point? I would think that, assuming he is correct, that we just ruled out consumption.
OP, can you post screenshots or pics of say January 2017 and January 2016 bills with your personal information blacked out please?
Yes I have been paying my bill not the whole amount at times. Thank you about my mother. No this was not her house she lived 400 miles away from me.Have you paid any of these charges yet? You mention being threatened with a stoppage of your electric service, so I would assume not.
You say your mother recently passed away. My condolences. Was this her house previously? Is it possible that there are old charges on the account from unpaid bills, perhaps while your mother was incapacitated?
Yes I have been paying my bill not the whole amount at times. Thank you about my mother. No this was not her house she lived 400 miles away from me.
That's good to know. I too was kinda toying with maybe designing my own at some point. Could probably even go a step further and have CTs on each branch circuit. Would be kinda neat to monitor each circuit individually too. I imagine it's tricky to design something like that though. Need to take power factor into consideration etc. Can get complicated to build.
This type of setup precludes the power company from screwing me over like what seems to be happening to the OP. They tried to overbill me once and I knew immediately that they were wrong.
OK dump question, how do you post screenshots?
Sorry guys. This started June of 2015, I know I should of got on it sooner but I lost my daughter in early 2015, so I was really depressed and wasn't really paying attention. And yes I have been paying on it I missed a few payments here and there but not entire year of payments here is a screen shot first one is what kwh's were used and what I was charged for the month. The 2nd one is how much my bill rose from June 2015 - June 2016
Wow. All that OT crap about your amazing setup, and you apparently didn't even read the thread. As best she can tell, they're billing her for the correct kWh usage.
And if you missed several months of payment, then probably that's why you got billed $500 instead $54.![]()