I have tested the currentcost and it's a different thing in some ways -- WattVision has the distinct advantage of not requiring you to open the electrical box, for one, but also doesn't have a display (yet). CurrentCost is all about the monitor, similar to Owl. I think everyone is working towards some sort of online feed; TED 5000 has one that hooks to Google PowerMeter, but WattVision is a somewhat simpler and more extensible design IMHO. Honestly, I like them all -- monitoring electricity has helped me identify innumerable little ways to use less; the big picture is that I now use about 1/2 the electricity I did a few years ago.
Are you using less electricity to do the same things, or are you living differently in order to lower your electricity use because electricity use is in your focus?
If so, would those changes be annoying to live with if you weren't so interested in your electricity use - if you tried to get a random person to reduce their electricity use in the same ways, would they say "sod that, it sounds too hard/stupid/cheap/complex"?
This is a really good question. To be sure, there's a selection bias going on here, which I think explains why I have been able to reduce our household consumption by more than 50%, where in controlled studies (e.g. by utilities that have installed similar meters in their houses) observed reductions are around 15%.
But I would also say that I have done this over the course of several years, and while many reductions were ones I got with no pain or expense almost immediately, others were ones where I bought a new router, for example, that allowed me to get rid of my fileserver/router setup. I bought several BITS Smart Strips to reduce phantom load. None of these change my lifestyle in any way, but they do require some initiative.
