Energy Monitoring - Day 1

For a while now, I have had a TED (The Energy Detective) installed in my home to help me monitor Energy consumption. I never used it as much as i should have, because it was fairly difficult to understand all the information it was providing (i have a very simple and minimal version of the TED).  Last week I completed some energy management training for Eragy Management Software and yesterday I installed the software into my Control-4 system and configured the setup. The installation took about 5 mins, and i started receiving information instantly.  My application happens to show up on my Control-4 touch screens. When I came home from work last night, I happened to notice that the kitchen touch panel was on, and displaying the Eragy management page.  Much to my surprise it showed me that i was currently (in real time) consuming 9890W and spending $.082 an hour.  That sounded like allot to me, and i immediately looked around to see what i could do to get it to drop down.  The first thing i noticed was that a lot of my outside lights were on. I tuned them off and the monitor immediately drooped to 6966W.  Than i saw that my wife had left the coffee maker power up sitting on the counter and when I turned that off the display dropped another 1000W to 5893W.  I continued to "quickly" run thru some things, shutting off some of the computers in my office that i typically leave on all the time, as well as some closet and bathroom lights that also seem to get left on.  At the end of my quick audit, my monitor read 2450W currently being consumed with an hourly spending cost $.30 - I was amazed at how apparent this system has made things in such a short experience.  I showed my wife, and she was also impressed.  She started almost playing with it, by turning certain things on and off to see how much it affected our overall costs - she started making he own assumption that she can still have allot of lights on to function - however if they are dimmed down, the consumption is so much lower.  You can basically have almost 3 times the amount of lights on at 30% than one set of lights on at 100% for the same amount of consumption.  I can not wait to see the effect on my next energy bill. This is defiantly not a gadget, but a valuable tool.