Today, I ran into this link again:
http://www.kondra.com/circuit/circuit.html
It discusses how to set up monitoring of your circuit panels to get detailed information on how much each circuit in your house is using. I’ve been looking to implement something similar at home, and I fired the author (Dave) an e-mail asking where he purchased his gear. He was very helpful (we’ve actually been having quite a long mail thread – seems like quite a nice guy!), and suggested that I e-mail “someone” at Trend Point, which is the company he developed the monitoring software for.
I fired “someone” an e-mail, saying I was interested in getting pricing on their new logic board (which looks very cool – supports an ethernet transport, with XML for the data). I got a reply back pretty quicky, just stating:
“I’m sorry but, we do not provide the software or hardware for home sales.”
I replied back, saying:
“Well, does it count that I run a small business out of my home? :) (Or is it a certification thing?)”
His reply was that their products run many thousands of dollars, so he can’t help me.
I *hate* it when sales people give you this crap. How does he know that I don’t want to spend a couple grand to monitor power at my house? If he took a second to peruse my web side, he’d quickly see that I’m a real geek, and willing to spend cash on good solutions. I sent him a short rant back saying that, and his reply again was just “Sorry, I can’t help you.”
All I really have to say is after that experience with a sales guy, this is one company I won’t be going to when I look at implementing circuit monitoring at work, and won’t suggest it to any of my clients. Their loss, I guess.
Update:
Dave called “someone”, and requested that “someone” shoot me another message. “someone” sent a good message, saying that they are currently over allocated for production, and that they are trying not to take any small orders at the moment. So, it wasn’t actually anything against a “home user”; it was just that he doesn’t want any small orders at the moment. I just wish that he had said that in the first place.. but I did also probably overreact a bit.