Reliant e-Sense: How to Save Power

Power Monitor, Free from e-Sense

Manage your usage and learn how to save power with a free reliant e-Sense® Home Energy Monitor. See how much electricity your home is using in near-real-time with the e-Sense Home Energy Monitor. Installation is easy and takes less than 5 minutes.

How it works

The e-Sense Home Energy Monitor is a small, electronic display that shows you how much electricity your home is using, with data updated every 10 seconds. And as you turn on your home’s electrical devices, the e-Sense Home Energy Monitor will show the incremental electricity usage — helping you understand your usage like never before.

How to tell if your home is compatible

Your home is ready for the e-Sense Home Energy Monitor if:

• You have a provisioned Smart Meter installed at your home (Find out if you have a Smart Meter.)
• You live in a single-family* home
• You are a Reliant customer in the CenterPoint or Oncor** service areas

*Due to device limitations, available for detached homes only; no apartments or condos. Devices will be sent to the physical service address only, no P.O. Boxes. Available while supplies last. Active Reliant customers may contact Reliant for up to 12 months for help with or replacement of defective device at no cost. **Not available to customers in Wichita Falls.

Order a Home Energy Monitor

You will need to contact your power company to order an e-Sense Home Energy Monitor. We will send you an email verifying whether or not your home is ready to receive one. If it is, we will mail it to you at no cost.

PRESS RELEASE

- Texas’ biggest electric delivery utilities announced Monday that their state will make history by jump starting the market for smart meter applications and empowering customers to benefit from smart meter technology.

The Biggest Energy Savers Campaign will encourage the development of new software applications to help customers easily understand and use information from their new smart meters. It will also encourage customers to make the most of their smart meter data by changing their habits to reduce their energy usage and control their electric costs.

Texas already has more than 3 million advanced meters installed and leads the nation in the generation of electricity from clean, renewable wind power. At the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, state regulators and business executives expressed pride in the Lone Star State’s leadership role.

“Texas has always been a global leader in energy and innovation,” said Barry Smitherman, Chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas. “We have a robust competitive market and are investing billions of dollars to improve our power grid, supporting cleaner generation and improving reliability. We couldn’t be more proud to have the two largest utilities in Texas with the broadest deployment of advanced meters in Texas leading the way through this new 21st century technology.”

 The Biggest Energy Savers Campaign Features:

The Biggest Energy Saver Campaign will feature a customer-savings contest that will drive the creation and use of customer-friendly tools for managing home energy consumption. By giving customers easy ways to read and understand the data provided by their meters to the Smart Meter Texas portal, the Biggest Energy Saver Campaign will help customers learn how to save power and make more educated decisions about their energy consumption.

In the Oncor and CenterPoint Energy service areas, one grand prize winner from each participating utility’s service area will receive the Grand Prize of a new electric vehicle while the first-place winners will receive a suite of GE smart appliances that are equipped to talk to the smart meter and empower consumers to make smarter, more informed decisions on how they consume energy.

Biggest Energy Saver will also award prizes to software application developers who help customers better understand and use data from their new meters to control and reduce their energy consumption. Developers of the best applications will compete for prizes totaling up to $150,000.

“This campaign serves not only as a way to motivate technological innovation, but also gives customers an exciting and rewarding new way to get involved,” said Floyd LeBlanc, CenterPoint Energy’s Vice President of Corporate Communications. “We want to see Texas customers using new tools to save energy and control their electric costs.”

The campaign, which is the largest of its kind in the nation, will promote the development of applications while educating customers about the benefits of using information from their advanced meters.

“As Texas customers face another hot summer, we want to help them realize the vast opportunities they have to better manage their energy use and control their costs,” said Brenda Jackson, Oncor Chief Customer Officer. “As we’ve talked with customers, they’ve asked us when they’ll be able to take full advantage of this new technology. We are advocating on their behalf to both software developers and device manufacturers.”

The Texas contests will run later this summer. Complete contest rules and registration will be available on the Biggest Energy Saver website at www.BiggestEnergySaver.com beginning mid-July. Until then, the website will serve as an online resource for customers to engage in conversations about smart meters and how to use smart technology to cut back on their electricity consumption, controlling their cost and making a positive impact on the environment.

BiggestEnergySaver.com also features the “smart talk” blog with energy advice from experts around the nation, as well as the real-life experiences of customers using advanced meter information to control their electricity consumption and costs.

The Biggest Energy Saver Campaign is also supported by founding partners Landis+Gyr and Itron with IBM as a collaborator. The Biggest Energy Saver contests are sponsored by Grid 21, a new non-profit organization and national initiative to engage electricity customers in using a new generation of tools and technologies to learn how to save power and better manage their electricity consumption. Additional prize sponsors include General Electric and Tendril.

About 85 Counties across central Texas are served by Ocor:

Today Oncor will become one of the first utilities in the nation to respond to a national initiative as we provide our customers with another tool to monitor and manage their energy use as we launch The Green Button on the state’s Smart Meter Texas Portal. The Green Button is an industry-led effort to provide customers with secure and easy access to their energy usage information from their smart meters in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format via a “Green Button” on electric utilities’ website. Oncor is one of the utilities participating in the national effort by installing The Green Button on the Smart Meter Texas Portal.

Green Button Program for Energy Conservation

The Green Button is based on the idea that when consumers have easy access to information on their household energy use, they can make learn how to save power and make educated decisions that conserve energy and save money. The initiative creates a common data format for the 15-minute power reads collected from residential advanced meters. This nationally-standardized data format allows customers who chose to do so to securely share their data with third party service providers that can analyze and interpret the usage information, spot trends and make personalized recommendations for the household.

“We are very excited about what this means for our customers,” Oncor Chief Customer Officer Brenda Jackson said. “The Green Button allows us to further empower our customers with information to save energy and potentially lower their electric bills. It is just another way for us to put the control in the customers’ hands.”

Oncor began its advanced meter program in 2008. Currently, more than 2.7 million advanced meters have been installed, with a total of more than 3.2 million to be completed by the end of the year. Customers in Oncor’s service territory showed how to save power last year during the company’s Biggest Energy Saver contest that by using the information from Oncor’s advanced meter they could reduce their electric usage and bills by 25 percent or more.