Entrepreneurial company Solaris Home Systems is putting together a small Environmental Management Automation (EMA) system. This comprises HomeSeer software and Solaris’ customized programming, along with some hardware connections, an 8-by-12-inch touchscreen, a small PC with flash drive, and a whole-house power meter. Solaris’ Ron Mocogni figures a comparable system would come out to $3,000 to $4,000.

Web-based home control company Control4 is also looking to do more. The company is working with several electric utilities in trials to provide homeowners with real-time electricity usage information and enable the utility to shut off power to certain appliances or devices in your home during peak load periods, if the homeowner allows. This “demand-side management” would help avoid brownouts and blackouts that occur during these peaks.

“We’re providing a connection to the smart meter, with [wireless protocol] ZigBee inside. We can see what the meter is reading, and we can post the information on every touchscreen and television,” says John Yoon, vice president of marketing. “We can pause the movie you’re watching and post an announcement of a rate-changing event, and you can override that. We can also aggregate energy use on a weekly, daily, or monthly basis in the home’s lighting or entertainment systems, and pinpoint devices that are using a lot of power.”

The company expects that with communicating, or “smart” meters, its system can be shutting off products in the home within six months.

Electric utilities may well be the answer to kick-starting more wide-scale adoption of home energy monitors.

GridPoint, whose $12,000 Energy Management Appliance can collect data on energy use and store extra electricity from a solar-powered system, is looking to distribute its SmartGrid Technology through utilities. If GridPoint has its way, utilities will become the gateways for energy monitoring systems in the home, by installing the technology that tracks a house’s energy use for both the homeowners and the utility.

Many more issues need to be worked out before all this happens, but at least energy monitoring in the home is on its way to becoming mainstream.

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Steven Castle - Contributing Writer

Steven Castle is Electronic House's managing editor. he has been writing about consumer electronics, homes and energy efficiency topics for two decades. He is also the co-founder of GreenTech Advocates.