Find Out Which Appliance Is Sucking All Your Power

Is your garage door opening right now? Is your washing machine running? A growing number of products attempt to give consumers data on the sources of their household energy use--crucial data for home efficiency efforts and utility peak-hour conservation programs. But Sense, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the first to offer a consumer product that reads incoming household power levels a million times per second--enough to tease out telltale clues to which specific appliances, even low-wattage ones, are operating in real time. "It's at the cutting edge of what I have seen people attempting in this area," says Michael Baker, a vice president at SBW, an energy efficiency consultancy in Seattle.