What were the main uses of this data? There's actually a lot of interesting uses here. Personally, I've been wanting some easy way to label certain circuits and outlets in my home via an app, and then get a real-time read on how much it is costing me to use them based on my area's energy rates.
I've long thought that simply making myself more aware of the actual dollar costs of usage for various things (leaving lights and computers on, etc.) could be a great way to nudge me towards better energy consumption habits (ditto for water usage).
Sorry for the late reply. The use of the energy data were to help figure were the power in your power bill was going. For example my Boss's old refrigerator was drawing a lot more power then expected. And giving hints on how to save.
We uploaded data from the box to the cloud once per minute, so you could see your usage.
We could give an estimate on daily/monthly/yearly cost. Electric rates can be weird, so businesses we had logic that would try to calculate and alert you when you were reaching a specific dollar figure (or peak period.. some utilities surcharge based on peak usage)
In general we had dashboards and alerts. Restaurants could see if the lights were on after a certain hour (usually closing). A big early win was a place that had electric heaters in the front windows that were on 24/7. It was fun watching the solar panels generate, and see when the clouds go by.
The company moved into hvac control with temperature sensors and monitoring refrigerators and cooking temperatures. Now I think they're selling services to oven companies and such.
Its AC so there is some work to pull the data out (we had a custom board to deal with the 14 channels).
Current transformers are what makes it work. There are some open source solutions are starting to show up that don't require uploading to the cloud. There are "Kill a watt" for single plug monitoring, but they lack logging.
I've long thought that simply making myself more aware of the actual dollar costs of usage for various things (leaving lights and computers on, etc.) could be a great way to nudge me towards better energy consumption habits (ditto for water usage).