The Fluke IR windows are part of a new initiative to make Arc-flash safety environments more accessible. And Fluke has just come out with a promo to get them into your facility.

Right now, if you order 50 or more of Fluke’s 3 inch IR windows or 4 inch IR windows then you can receive a free thermal imager to outfit another member of your team.

Using IR windows across a facility means no more working from inside an Arc-flash safety suit, no more panel cover removals and replacements, and allows you to inspect an area at any time!

• When you buy 50 windows you receive a Fluke Ti9 (valued at $2,495.00 USD $2,895.00 CAD)

• Buy 100 and get a Fluke Ti25 (valued at $5,295.00 USD CA$5,895.00 CAD)

• Outfit your entire facility with 200 windows and get a Fluke Ti32! (valued at $8,995.00 USD $9,995.00 CAD)

This is only running till June 30th, so if you’ve been considering whether to adopt an IR window system for your work-space: now is the time!

You can find the entire line of Fluke IR windows on Optimum Stores, and we’ve hosted the redemption form for the Fluke free thermal imager.

This post was originally published on Optimum Energy Products Blog at Fluke Promotion: Free Thermal Imager With IR Windows!

Earlier this week we looked at mobile apps that work with TED, but sometimes its nice to have a proper screen and keyboard. Here we’ve got some of the desktop software applications designed to interface with your TED 5000 power meter. These all come recommended from The Energy Detective, but we’ve done a little analysis of our own too.

Desktop Applications:

Bidgely: Is a free cloud based energy monitoring and management tool. Features interactive graphs that show real time energy use. View individual appliance energy consumption, simple pie charts show appliance-level breakdown of energy bill. No additional hardware plug level sensors required. Provides personalized recommendations on saving money. Features timely alerts that avoid unexpected high energy bills.

Our Take:

Bidgely started life as My Ener$ave, but evolved into its current form after the death of Google Powermeter. A large part of their philosophy is taking the Detective out of The Energy Detective. They want to make all the relevant information available to you without digging down. Bidgely is expecting to evolve beyond the TED 5000 to operate with smart meters as utility companies start using new technologies. Part of their “cloud-based” feature is that their software is designed to recognize energy spikes and associate them with each individual appliance as it turns on and off. The cloud potential of this software, along with its history of updates and support, suggest a good fit for anyone interested in what their meter results.

PlotWatt: Is a free application that features cloud-based algorithms to analyze your TED data and provide appliance-level insight, feedback and recommendations to help save money on your electric bills. Reduce electricity usage by up to 50%. Receive customized money-saving recommendations and tips. PlotWatt Energy Dashboard consolidates energy information. Electricity usage presented in an easy-to-understand format.

Our Take:

PlotWatt is definitely doing everything they can to make their setup simple and accessible. They have a cute little video explaining the basics of how their system runs, and why you should use it. Like other programs, they do offer appliance specific information using their “top secret algorithms.” They also offer comparison to other houses by zip-code, something that was popular in the mobile apps. PlottWatt does seem to be very accessible and open, with the developer emails being prominent. If you’re looking for lots of technical under-the-hood information though, their hold your hand setup might not be as appealing.

MyEragy: Available in both Free and Pro versions, MyEragy is an electricity monitoring platform that allows homeowners to check the details of their energy consumption to best understand how they can reduce their electricity bills. Easily monitor energy generated by solar, wind, and gas generators. Eragy’s proprietary Utility Rate Engine helps users understand rates. Email and text/SMS alerts including usage and cost budget overruns. Set rate alerts such as when a rate tier is about to be exceeded.

Our Take:

As one of the few programs offering a Free and a Pro version, MyEragy has a two tiered option depending on your use. The Pro version enables things like email and SMS updates for home users, but its real purpose is for the larger power analysis done by commercial and industrial building managers, utility companies, and alternative energy installers. If you were looking to track power through different wings of a university campus, this is the sort of program we’d choose. Eragy is also unique in that it can accommodate positive power  production through wind or solar panels and factor that in to your calculations, part of why its specifically tailored to alternate energy companies. Part of this wider purpose means that they support more energy monitors than just the TED 5000, opening the door to Blueline meters and others.

it’s electric: One of the first free applications that allows you to view tour TED 5000 electricity data remotely on the web. Shows detailed historical data with different resolutions. View interactive graphs and locate energy hogs. See instant updates while you explore your usage.

Our Take:

it’s electric is certainly one of the earliest pieces of software featuring the sort of live update information that drives all these programs. Like some of the mobile apps, it seems to be a personal project of Robert Schneck. You get all your data recorded and graphed, but any rate and monetary math would have to be done by you using the data you export from the program. One of the best features about it’s electric is that you can see Robert’s data live streaming on the front page of the website. We were very pleased to see exactly what kind of layout and data we would be getting when we installed the program. Many of the other companies offering this service require you to register and log in before offering up a full demo of how the software actually runs. The source files are also available online for anyone tech savvy who might want to modify the code for their own tailored tasks. Robert Schneck has definitely done a variety of tweaks and updates of his own as the program seems to have reached completion at version 1.8

TED the Toolbar: TED the Toolbar is a Firefox only toolbar that allows you to view real-time energy data from your TED system while you surf the Web. Shows historical data and projected monthly bill. View graphs on electricity usage for detailed data. See instant updates on the top of the page while you surf the web.

Our Take:

Jay Nick’s browser specific TED display is a basic but immediately accessible Add-on for Firefox. It essentially pulls the data from your TED 5000 and displays it as a streaming page, as well as giving you at-a-glance information on the tool bar. There are some basic cost and graphing functions, but this piece seems more geared towards someone who is interested in their energy use rather than someone who is waging a statistical campaign to control and limit their energy consumption. Worth having if you run Firefox on a daily basis, but some of the other programs here are more dedicated in purpose.

All the programs we looked at seemed to be functional at the very least, and offer a good variety of ways to use the data coming out of your TED monitor. Its when you start to plot and analyze the information coming out of your monitor that you can see real patterns and results. If you’re looking for analysis software  you can take with you we’ve got a list of TED 5000 mobile apps.

Thinking about getting set up with a power meter for yourself? You can use find the TED 5000 for sale in Canada and available world wide on OptimumStores.com

This post was originally published on Optimum Energy Products Blog at TED 5000 Desktop Software and Applications Review

As one of our most popular home power meters, the TED 5000 has grown substantially over the past year or so. The number of Third-Party Apps available has tripled since we last looked, offering a whole swathe of different ways to track the data coming out of your TED unit. We’ve broken down the ones TED recommends here and done a little bit of analysis as to what might work best for you!

Mobile iOS Apps

TED-O-Meter is a free smart phone application that is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch.  An interactive dial shows real-time electricity usage.

Our Take: Ted-o-meter gets generally high reviews on the app store, and went through a few early updates. One of the limitations is that it does not have the enhanced graphing options that other desktop suites offer. The gauge display is fairly unique to TED apps, and answers the basic question of “How much energy am I using right now?” It offers a total calculation for today or for the month, and has Username and Password options for when connecting to the TED.

People Power 1.0 is a free energy manager app available for Smartphones that provides real-time insight, choice, and control over household energy use. It integrates with the TED 5000 Gateway™ through a simple set-up and connects to People Power’s analysis software to deliver useful information anytime, anywhere.

Our Take: One of the sharpest presentations and most comprehensive apps, People Power won AT&T’s Power Your Future Contest for a reason. In addition to regular features like live monitoring and tracking by day/month/year, you can also set a rate plan that matches your utility provider for the most accurate cost estimates. Goals can be set with red, yellow and green alerts coming up as you approach or exceed them. Most interesting to us, you can compare your usage against typical households in your area or other states & countries. There are some unusual but maybe not as useful social media options where you compete against other people using the app and get recommendations from the web of energy saving appliances and green-living tips.

MiraWatt T5K allows you to view power usage data on your iPhone. A simple swipe gesture on your iPhone will change the view from Hour, Day, Week, etc.

Our Take: One of the few apps with a price tag associated with it, MiraWatt feels a little steep at $4.99. Maybe a 99 cent app would see wider adoption. It does provide some good graphing capability, letting you choose from bar or line graph styles, but it would be nice if it had some way to attach a dollar value to your energy consumption stats. Its also worth noting that this app has not been updated since July 2012 and as a result is incompatible with any iPad you may want to monitor energy usage from. Other people on the app store have definitely bought this only to discover it cannot launch on the large screen iPad.

iTED is a mobile application for iOS and Android OS devices such as the iPhone and Droid phone models for monitoring energy usage in conjunction with our TED 5000 series. You can monitor your home and or business energy usage while-on-the-go or the help figure out about how much that new appliance you turned on uses in energy!

Our Take: As a $0.99 app iTED was made by one man, Garrett Bartley specifically to address problems he’d experienced with other apps. A functional and robust piece of software, it allows you to set costs, graph and track on a live grid exactly how much is being consumed at what rate. There is also an Android version of iTED which is a nice alternative if your running non-apple devices. It’s worth noting though that this app has no reviews yet of this app.

TED 5000 is a free mobile application for the iPhone that provides current Power and Cost, as well as average power and cost for the billing cycle. The user can refresh their energy data anytime by clicking the refresh button.

Our Take: Unfortunately its hard to learn much about the TED 5000 app as it is unavailable in any of the international app stores! But from what we’ve seen, it seems to display the live data your device would output to the TED 5000 optional display. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of graphing or rate functionality, but as a basic monitoring device it seems to be a direct and clean cut source of information.

AndTED is an energy monitoring application for TED 5000 users on Android. This application allows you to view MTUs independently, which is great for consumers with solar or wind installations.

Our Take: One of the only apps designed specifically for the Android OS, this unit is free and has some excellent ratings online. AndTED does offer graphing and a wide variety of statistics including peaks and lows for a given time period. With your rates in place you can see what your currently acumulated bill will cost and a forecast of what the month’s trend might be. As a bonus, it seems the developer is generally accessible for any questions or problems that might come up.

TEDisplay is a mobile application for HP/Palm webOS devices, such as the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. TEDisplay works with your TED 5000 to monitor energy usage directly on your phone. TEDisplay supports multi-MTU configurations with access to just about every data value available from the TED 5000. And, with a properly configured home network, you can monitor your energy usage from just about anywhere!

Our Take: You can scroll forever on the developers web-page in a surprisingly detailed guide of how to take advantage of this app. It seems well worth the $0.99 price tag, but only if you actually have an HP device to run it. Being a smaller app market, this seems like the only option for TED owners with an HP device, and it is certainly a good one.

Do you access your TED from a mobile device? We’d love to hear from you! We’ve also got a list of TED 5000 desktop applications posted if you prefer a screen and keyboard.

Thinking about getting set up with a power meter for yourself? Check out our review of the TED 5000. You can use find the TED 5000 for sale in Canada and available world wide on OptimumStores.com

This post was originally published on Optimum Energy Products Blog at TED 5000 iPhone and Android Mobile Apps Review

We’ve been meaning for some time now to stack these two head to head, see where the differences lie, and find out what sort of starter unit might work best for you. Fluke has rolled out a new entry level thermal camera, the Fluke Ti100, while FLIR had an update to their popular i-Series of thermal imaging cameras recently.

Fluke offers two different cameras at the same price, $2495.00 for both the original Fluke TiS camera and the newly released Fluke Ti-100 camera. FLIR has three cheaper units with a few less features, the i3, i5, and i7 which run from $1595.00 to 1995.00. The FLIR i7 is closest in price and features to the Ti-100, so we’ve pitted them together.

The i7 is a square sensor with 140X140 pixels for a total of 19600. The Ti100 uses a portrait framed sensor with 160X120 sensor. They end up being nearly identical, with the Ti100 being a hair’s breadth less at 19,200 pixels compared to FLIR’s 19,600.

Reading a thermal image can take some getting used to. If you’re new to the trade, and depending on the environment, you may find the rainbow stripes of the picture on your screen don’t seem to match up with what you see in front of you. The Fluke Ti100 helps this with a built-in laser indicator to directly connect what you’re seeing through the camera to what you’re seeing with your eyes. That way, when you identify a problem through the screen of the camera, you can see a visible laser letting you know that its that specific green wire that glows hot. This isn’t the first integral laser point we’ve seen, but it is the lowest price point that includes that.

The big jump between the FLIR i7 and the other popular Fluke: the TiS infrared camera, is the manual focus found in the TiS. The Fluke Ti100 is closer kin to the FLIR i7 in that it too uses an automatic focus. Although its worth noting that while both cameras can focus 4 feet in front of them, the i7 lists a max range of 6 feet, while Fluke promises that their unit will focus as far away as you can get resolution for. Both cameras use a focus-free system rather than an auto-focus.

The screen in the Fluke is bigger by a little more than a half inch. Its portrait format screen is 3.5 inches across, compared to FLIR’s 2.8 inch square setup.

FLIR saves their images and reports as a universal JPEG file, which can be opened on any computer. Fluke uses a proprietary .is2 file format that is a little bit trickier. All Fluke products though include the Smart View software to read and manipulate those pictures.

The internal rechargeable batteries are very similar, with each manufacturer putting run-time in the ballpark of 4-5 hours.

These cameras have a similar suite of features, but its important to point out the price differential between them. By the time you hit the $2495.00 price tag of the Fluke Ti100, you are on level with the second stage of FLIR cameras: the FLIR E30. The E-series have both the laser indicator and a small light to illuminate dark spaces, similar to the Ti-100. Plus the E30 has the much coveted manual focus lens, allowing for variation in distance like the Fluke TiS.

If you want to see more detailed charts comparing these or any other units, you can do so on OptimumStores.com using our compare feature.

The prices you see in this post are USD, and accurate at the time of publishing (April 23rd 2012) But they may change as product lines change in the future. Please refer to Optimum Stores for the most recent pricing.

This post was originally published on Optimum Energy Products Blog at New FLIR i7 V.S. Fluke Ti100

Alex McEachern is one of the world leaders in Power Quality analysis. As president of Power Standards Lab, he is responsible for the creation of the PQube Power Quality Analyzer and is one of the most well traveled experts. His updates pointed us to that story about the FAA’s Radar, and now he’s been out in Hawaii solving problems on a huge photovoltaic solar farm. As he described it to us:

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of solving a photovoltaic array problem — actually, an instrumentation problem — in Hawaii with Paul Spracklen of Xtreme Power and David Rose of Sandia National Labs. The 1 megawatt solar array, located in a remote field on a small island, was coupled to one of Xtreme Power’s impressive DC storage systems. This array of solar cells is fairly low to the ground, so to keep the plants from growing up and over it, a flock of surprisingly curious sheep roam underneath the panels.

The PQube monitor at the site was showing unusual readings, and Paul, David, and I were there to figure out what was going on.

The solar farm provides a significant fraction of the island’s power, so we quickly learned that we could not do our work during the day. Everything would have to be done at night. Outdoors. In the dark. Not how I would ordinarily prefer to work on 480 volts and 12.6 kilovolts…

After some investigation, we suspected that there was substantial noise present, probably in the unregulated 2kHz – 150 kHz region. I replaced the standard current transformer cables with shielded cables, and did some judicious re-routing of the twisted-pair current signal wires at the PQube, and that solved the problem.

Later calculations showed that, given the high noise level at this location, a differential capacitive coupling of less than half a picofarad would explain the odd readings we had seen.

This part of the frequency spectrum — 2kHz – 150kHz — is pretty much the Wild West. There are very few regulations. And as power inverters get bigger, we’re seeing more and more problems around the world.

Claudia Imposimato’s Working Group 6 of IEC Subcommittee 77A is writing a Standard for conducted immunity testing in the 2kHz – 150 kHz region, and my own Working Group 9 is writing a Standard method for measuring conducted power disturbances in this region. Please let me know if you have had problems yourself — there don’t seem to be any regulations, anywhere in the world, that limit either emissions or susceptibility in this part of the frequency spectrum. Time to fix that!

David is still working on solving a different problem at the site: why the mobile-phone-based ethernet modem stopped working a few months ago. But I have great confidence that he and Thomas Pua, PSL’s expert on this, will be able to figure it out soon. Meanwhile, the PQube at the site is happily running along, storing all its measurements on its 4-gigabyte SD card for later analysis.

You may not be running radar, but if your looking at any kind of power quality issue you can find the PQube on OptimumStores.

This post was originally published on Optimum Energy Products Blog at Alex McEachern of Power-Standards-Lab Puts the PQube to Work in Hawaii

The new FLIR T-440 and FLIR T-640 are equipped with a whole host of neat new features. From the continual auto-focus, to the remote operation via iPad, they are fully fledged professional grade cameras.

One of the biggest additions being talked about as “game changer” is the MSX Multi-Spectral Dynamic Imaging

A regular thermal image only displays heat signatures, so key details apparent to the eye can be lost in the haze if they are a similar temperature.  FLIR cameras with MSX use two internal 5MP digital cameras to enhance the thermal image. The high-contrast skeletonized visual image allows for key aspects of the visible spectrum to be overlaid on top of the thermal output while still keeping the important thermal information prominent.

Consider the power panel above for example: Through the thermal camera you can see that one of the connections is hot, and with your own eye you can see a label identifying each connection on the panel. But the ink on those labels is going to be the exact same as the sticker they’re printed on, so your thermal imager won’t differentiate between panel 27 and 29. Sure you could count down one by one, but what if your panel has 200 connections?

MSX uses the visual data from two separate 5MP digital cameras built into the T440 and T640. Internal software then analyzes the image from the cameras and the thermal lens to super-impose the key aspects of that visual world onto the thermal image. We’ve got a gallery worth of comparison images putting MSX first and foremost. Details that would normally wash away under the thermal filter are rebuilt using the visual information. FLIR must be running some pretty intense calculations in this, because the visual spectrum never blots out the thermal side of things, making sure that your information is still at the highest level of accuracy. Lets take a look at our power panel example:

The thermal information is still the same, but all the important details that you’d make out with your eyes have been integrated. The big thing here is while you may certainly see the numbers looking away from the imager, you may not be able to line them up properly with the thermal data to determine which connection is the hot one. MSX does this for you, making sure that each real world part is linked to a thermal part. Take a look at the lineup we’ve got of comparison images. In each case you can see a fairly substantial jump between the raw thermal image, and the enhanced MSX version.

If your looking to set yourself up with one of the new FLIR T440 or FLIR T640 units to take advantage of the MSX imaging, you can find them here.

This post was originally published on Optimum Energy Products Blog at FLIR’s MSX Multi-Spectral Dynamic Imaging Comparison: A Revolution in Thermal Image Enhancement