WattsUp Pro measures electric waste

WANT TO know how much energy your PCs and home appliances are using when idle? How many dollars or pounds sterling your DVD player left on wastes? WattsUP does this and graphs it all.

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Product: WattsUp PRO
Company: Electronic Educational Devices
Requirements: Electricity, PC with USB (optional)
Web site: www.doubleed.com
Operating voltage: 100-240v AC, 50-60Hz
Price: $129 (EU distribution expected Q3 07)

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The Hardware
The WattsUp PRO -from hereinafter referred to as just 'WUP'- is a black box about the size of a VHS tape, just an inch shorter and a bit thicker-. It has one long power cord and one USA 3-prong female socket, where you plug the appliance(s) to measure. There are two buttons labelled "Mode" and "Select" and of course a LCD display showing one of the following: current voltage, energy consumption and power (watt and AMPs), total time of the current measure, and a real-time calculation of watts/hour. Finally, it shows the cumulative cost -as in wonga- of using the device since measurement started. You toggle between modes predictably by pressing the Mode button.

Using the Select button you can for instance modify readings. If you're in "Cost Mode" and press Select you can switch the reading to "Average monthly cost". What it does is simply do the math and multiply the cost/hour based on the cumulative measurement to get the 720 hours/month figure. If you're in Watts mode you can get readings of the Minimum and Maximum recorded watt readings.

WattsUP PRO measuring a 110v Philips DVD player

This version I tested can take up to a 1800 watt device. So you should avoid plugging anything above the average hair dryer into it. Don't expect to use this one to measure a line leading to several air conditioners :). The WUP has internal memory to store the 16 recorded readings and the timestamps of each value, once 1023 records are stored, it starts discarding the earlier values, increasing the sample rate, which starts at one second and doubles with each filling of the internal buffer memory. The memory contents are retained in the unit for later download using the WUP software, although you are asked after a power cycle if you want to erase the memory contents to start a new measurement -say for measuring a different appliance or device-.

Despite 110V description, should work everywhere
When I asked the firm if I would hear a loud Bang and see a giant cloud of white smoke coming from the unit after plugging it into my country's 220V, 50Hz socket, the firm's response was "plug away!". They explained it better: "our meters are world-wide compatible and will operate just fine from 100-240v, 50/60 Hz, 20 amps. We currently just ship with USA style cord and receptacle though, so you will need to get a plug adapter locally."

I did and I'm happy to inform the unit works fine both in 110v and 220v. Plus, the firmware apparently has internal optimizations to detect and address the 50Hz / 60Hz differences so that these do not skew the results.

WUP plugged into 220V wall socket with my Dual-Core Opteron desktop
Notice the home-made adapter to the local female socket/plug

The Software
The firm includes a nice printed leaflet with the device which reads "To insure you receive the most recent software release, please go to our website at www.wattsupmeters.com and download the software". All fine... except that for some reason I got redirected to a "secure" https:// version of the normal URL, and the download stalled at around 7%-10%, several times. I just copied the URL, manually removed the "s" from https, and received the 1.4MB+ file in seconds. Why make things overly complicated with no need?.

https:// download? surely some mistake

Plugging the unit shows several Windows dialogues, basically because this is a serial unit, with a USB-to-serial chip inside, so WinXP will first detect a "USB to Serial converter" and then a "new serial port", which in my notebook was mapped as "COM4". While the notes on the software installer claim that the drivers windows looks for are in C:Program FilesEEDDrivers, they are actually in c:program fileseedwattsupUSBdrivers. Once Windows has found the files and you have the drivers installed and the new "COM port" in place, you can run the installed application to get saved data from the device's internal memory into your PC for perusing, creating graphs, and the like.

The software operates in "batches", reading the data from the unit to your PC for display or saving to disk. It can also "upload" parameters to the unit. For instance, one of the first things you should do is get into "Meter Settings" and change the "Power Costs" from the default $0.10 -which I assume is some sort of average for the U.S.- to your country's own energy costs. There's an "Euros" check box, for those in Euroland. In my case I lowered the value to my country's $0.033 per kWh, an average I did by taking my last energy bill and dividing the total cost with the kWh consumed, this way I get not only the "theoretical" kWh cost but also all taxes that are added on top of the energy consumption figure.

Rating software is a highly personal opinion... but I think the current incarnation of the WUP software is too feature-bloated. Yes, you can graph the data any way you want, switch from table to graph view and graph every value you wish in a dozen ways, even in 3D and "rotating" the graph. The usefulness of all that eye candy remains to be seen. Plus, in some instances it looks as if the developers get "trigger happy" with some toolkit features, and for instance the "spreadsheet" look is used in places where it doesn't belong... like when detecting the unit, the results of COM ports and detected units are shown in a familiar "Spreadsheet view" window, with two columns and several rows.

Top: Graph view. Below: table view

If I had any role in the design of this application, I would have made this a 100% Java application, as it's the ideal framework for this kind of device. Not only it would have covered all platforms with a single software, but it's also the kind of application where Java excels, as serial I/O is something Java does very well. Don't get me wrong... the current WUP software works well for its intended purpose, albeit a few features leave room for improvement. The option "Save table data" for instance shows only ".TXT" in the file type drop down. I would have expected OpenDocument support - not to mention XLS.

Save Table data as... TXT. No OpenOffice .ODS?. Surely some mistake...

The good news is that I asked the firm for the "software API" to communicate with the device and they gladly sent back a document with it!. So anyone could write a Linux or a cross-platform Java application that mimics -or even improves upon- the current Windows software. Speaking of software, the company sells a beefed-up software version dubbed WUP "REALTIME" which, you guessed it, monitors the power consumption in real-time and can alert you by e-mail when voltage drops below safe levels and creates daily log files of power demand, can e-mail the user if consumption exceeds user selected level and also -hooray- can export data to Excel and Word. I know companies have to make a profit but this sounds a bit like a deliberate dumbing-down of the software to make you buy the PRO version.

Measuring up
Using this device was not only fun but informative as well. It alerted me on a few power wasters plugged in my home. For instance, compare the following results:

Helios DVD player, in "off" (standby) mode:  8.8 W
Helios DVD player, playing movie:           13.6 W

Philips DVP5960 player, in standby mode: 0.7 W
Philips DVP5960 player, playing movie:   6.9 W

Opteron Dual-Core desktop* (sans monitor)

Powered off (standby):   7.7 W
POST start-up:         132.0 W
Booting Linux:         101.0 W
Idle Gnome deskop:      98.7 W
Compressing ZIP file:  141.6 W

(*) 2GB DDR2 RAM, 20GB PATA HD, ATI X1300 256MB Gfx card, Idle 52x CD-ROM.

Coming to Euroland, Blighty included
Brad Volin from the WUP firm said that a EU-friendly version should come later this year: "in Q3, we will introduce a version with IEC 320 receptacles, similar to the ones on computers. These will ship with a separate power cord, which can be purchased with country specific plugs. This will eliminate the need to get a plug adapter. It will also allow us to label the meter to its full capacity, and have the CE mark. At that point, we will establish distribution in the UK and Europe".

If you are reading this outside U.S. borders and you can't wait but you're handy with a cable cutter and a screwdriver -if you're not, what are you doing reading the INQ? ;)-, and you don't want to cut or maim the WUP unit as sold in North America, you can do as I did, and mail order one $2.50 "Power Strip Saver" from the US of A... this will give you one male and female US power socket, joined by a piece of cable.

After cutting the cable in the middle, you only need to purchase one male and female power plug for your country and connect each to the end of each "strip saver" halve of the opposite sex ;) male with female and vice-versa. Bingo, there you have two adapters, one from your country's male plug to a female 110v US socket and another 110v male to your country's female socket. Hey, it worked for me.

The WUP is both a fun and informative device to have around the house. The more you use it, the more you realize how much you waste by leaving some "always on" appliances "sleeping". The only problem I see is that the WUP is addictive... now I'd like to have one WUP attached to every PC, appliance and wall socket.?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Good Well constructed, easy to read display, does what it says in the box. Software API available so you could write your own software.

Bad Software could use some rework. Only Windows supported out of the box. A bit on the expensive side compared to stand-alone devices without PC interface. Lack of spreadsheet export not good. Also, "real time" software upgrade is a bit expensive for my taste.

Ugly 110 V US of A socket and male plug. This will soon change and as you could see in this article is not a big hurdle for the motivated geek with a screwdriver and wire cutter.

Bartender's Verdict

See Also
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INQUIRER solar panels get squeezed in mad TV land grab
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Fernando's Multi-Core AMD opteron clear Desktop

L'INQS
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2005: AMD got its Energy Star certificate
VIA debuts 'carbon-free' clean-computing x86 CPU