Black and Decker Power Monitor: Not Worth it For Ontario Customers
Happy Easter everyone!
I was just at Canadian Tire on the weekend and I saw the Black and Decker Power Monitor there and decided to give it a shot. I got it installed on my Smart Hydro Meter, but quickly found that the unit was having trouble picking up the sigal from the Smart Meter. After several attempts to find troubleshooting for my particular type of hydro meter, I decided to read more on the Smart Meter technology on the Hydro One Website…
What I found was that by 2010, all Ontario residents will have a Smart Meter installed and will be able to view your energy usage online. This way you can track what times you are using the most energy, and then you can adjust to keep your energy usage at a minimum during peak hours. With that being said, this will also be the start of Time-of-Day (TOD) billing which will see high rates during peak hours (estimated at 8.8 cents per kW) and low rates during off hours (estimated at 4.0 cents per kW)
Therefore, if you currently live in Ontario and have purchased a Black and Decker Power Monitor, it will essentially be useless by sometime next year. You will be able to more accurately check your usage on the internet and have access to the past 13 months of usage to monitor your progress. I suggest that if you’ve purchased the Power Monitor recently, you take it back for a refund and wait patiently for the smart meter technology to come into effect.
