Is your refrigerator running?

When you get your electricity bill at the end of the month, you know how much power you used but it’s very hard to figure out how you used that power.  Which appliance is being the biggest glutton for electricity?  Did switching all your light bulbs to CFLs actually make a difference?  How much did it cost you to fall asleep with the TV on last night?  To answer questions like this, we’re teaming up with internet-connected power meter creators to automatically bring home and appliance specific electricity information into your WattzOn profile.

The basic idea behind all power meters is that you plug them into an outlet and then you plug an electrical appliance into them.  This lets the device track how much power the appliance is using as the electricity passes through.  The devices we are working with then continually send this data wirelessly to an internet-connected computer so that the data can be collected and examined.

WattzOn has created a central location to present the collected information as an easy-to-explore interactive graph – to help you understand what goes into your electric bill each month. You can also get instantaneous feedback on how effective your energy saving choices (such as, say, turning off your television when you leave the room) are with regards to your personal power consumption.

Check out the first two devices that we are supporting:

ACme

WattzOn is accepting live data collected by ACme units – the same units being used in the Green Soda Project at Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  The Green Soda Project is an effort to reduce the energy consumption of Berkeley’s Soda Hall by monitoring power consumption in real-time using ACme – an open source hardware and software platform developed by Xiaofan (Fred) Jiang that enables wireless energy/power measurement and control of AC devices using a mesh network. The ACme node fills the gap between inexpensive LCD watt-meters (e.g. Kill-A-Watt) and expensive networked enterprise energy monitors.  Though you can’t get an ACme device yourself just yet, commercial versions will be available soon.  In the meantime, check out Fred’s public profile to see what his appliances are up to!  (screenshot below)

Right now, ACme devices are sending WattzOn data via the internet, and WattzOn is continuously updating Fred’s profile.  As you can see, WattzOn provides an interactive graph that allows you to zoom in on any time frame and see the electricity profile for each appliance on the network.  You can observe when the monitored appliances turn on and off and see which are contributing the most to your electricity usage.  Knowing, for example, that the PlayStation 3 uses the most power of any of your electronics is a good reason to make sure it is turned off when not in use!

Tweet-A-Watt

WattzOn also supports the Tweet-A-Watt, a Kill-a-Watt power meter modified to “tweet” the daily power consumed by the connected appliance to a Twitter account.  The creators (Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries and Phillip Torrone of  MAKE magazine) decided to make the project open-source and have published instructions online.  So, if you have a Kill-A-Watt you’d like to vivisect and you’re comfortable with a soldering iron, you can make one of these gizmos yourself using this kit!

Adafruit has 3 Tweet-A-Watts in their offices – each hooked up to a different set of electronics.  As you can see from the screenshot below, some appliances (like the computers) are always on while some (like the lab equipment/tools) are periodically used.

You can always see the latest data from Adafruit’s Tweet-A-Watts on their public profile!

DIY

These are just the first of many devices that WattzOn is linking to in order to provide our users with the most accurate tools to automatically monitor their power consumption.

But, we’re very excited to add support for any power meters you may be using or creating!  Check out our user Kelvin, who created his own type of power meter and is using our API to keep track of a whole bunch of his appliances on his WattzOn profile. (and, keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post where we interview him about his efficiency efforts!) We’re also brainstorming with the people at Wattvision and Pachube right now.  It’s our goal to get as many people working in the power meter space talking, so that we can all work together to improve the tools for home efficiency.

If you have a device that you would like us to support – or, if you’d be interested in getting one for your own home, please let us know at us [at] wattzon.com!

This is the future of personal energy monitoring – why don’t we go catch it?

Electricity Data: The Devil is in the Details

I have written several posts about the Smart Grid recently, both here and on my personal blog. I got an email from a man in China today, as follows:

Hi Tom,

You are running a fabulous blog, and the discussions are rather helpful. [Ed Note: Entirely gratuitous reference to author's blog ]

Well, I have one question, how do you compile the curves of the electricity consumption in the last four years ? You get the historical data from your utility at a fee, or you have installed the meter yourself ? Making a day-to-day, and year-to-year data can be exhausting, but it is absolutely necessary.

{email and name}
–
Assistant Director, CEM China Team

Association of Energy Engineers CEM Program

His email was in reply to the data I have posted on how we have reduced our electrical consumption a great deal — to date more than 1/2, and at the time a bit less than that (check out the graph below).

Here’s my reply (in which I have included some links and some headers):

Samuel –

Thanks for your inquiry on my electricity reduction data as posted on my blog at FivePercent [Ed Note: entirely gratuitous self-promotion on the part of the author]

Reading Your Utility Bills

The data are from monthly bills based on meter readings, provided by my electric utility, free, as part of their service. The bills include the meter-read date, so I am able to calculate the average kWh/day for the measured month.

Our utility provides 13 months of meter data on each paper bill, and also provides historical views of bills (pdf files) going back several years, although most of the data was copied from the paper bills I had saved. The data as presented is simply a chart of the month-over-month kWh usage, compared on a year-over-year basis. This pattern was the most useful representation of the data because there is a natural pattern of electrical use in our household correlated primarily to the number of daylight hours, and secondarily to a small amount of electrical heating we do in the basement (the rest is natural gas).

Recently, the utility has begun providing the calculation of kWh/day of usage on the bill — good for other customers, since the other data provided do not normalize for the length of the billing cycle. For example, I got our bill today for the prior period and was alarmed to see a large cost compared to the previous month (for which they provide a bar chart), but then saw that the billing cycle was 34 days compared to 29 the previous month — it the end, our consumption was slightly down on a day-by-day basis.

Real-time Electrical Meters

We have installed an ancillary meter that provides near-real-time usage data via a wireless display monitor in our kitchen. Our device is designed to read data from the electricity meter at our house, using one of several possible methods, depending on the meter type (none involving smart meters). Another widely available device in the US and UK is called “The Energy Detective” or “The Owl“, which work by measuring the impedance on the incoming A/C feed. The would be much more accurate and immediate. But in neither case are these meters used to actually calculate our bill — they are just a way to get at that critical momentary data. However neither device provides a data recording mechanism, so all you can see is how much you are consuming now.

Evil, Evil Level Billing

The momentary data from the real-time meters is far, far more useful than a monthly bill, which you rightly point out is of little value to the typical electrical consumer. However, there’s a practice in the US, at least that further disguises the actual usage, known as “level billing”. Consumers who choose this method pay a fixed monthly rate based on the average consumption of the prior year. The rate is adjusted up or down based on actual consumption on a yearly basis — in effect this is a financing mechanism offered by the utilities. In reality, this further masks the cost of energy beyond the already overly-aggregated data on the monthly bill.

Smart Meters

Smart Meters are clearly superior in every respect, assuming the electric (or other energy) utility, or even an intermediate data aggregator, is able to store the data as a suitably fine level of detail (e.g. 15 minute intervals) and also provide reporting tools that allow customers to understand and visualized their energy usage, both in aggregate as well as momentary data. The Google Power Meter project aims to provide exactly this level of detail. Smart Metering takes the “exhausting” part out of the effort, while providing the “absolutely necessary” data a consumer needs to make an informed decision.

I think your comment and question is exactly the right one we need to be asking. I’ll post an anonymous version of your question and my reply on one of the blogs I post to!

WattzOn Does All the Heavy Lifting for You

And it’s worth repeating that if your electricity is from one of the supported vendors, WattzOn can do all of the exhausting dirty-work I did by hand and give you the same view. Just link your account and all the rest is gravy!

Actions Speak Louder than Governments

If you logged in to WattzOn today, you probably noticed that your total power footprint is significantly smaller and that your data (profile) page looks very different than last week.  We really wanted to improve the accessibility and usability of your energy consumption data – and we’ve made some changes that we think will do just that.

So, what changed?

Anarchy!

The reason that your total watts is lower is that we’ve overthrown the government! (pie slice)

This decision was partially because the government calculation algorithm was easily the most debated aspect of our methodology on our forums.  We do listen to our users’ concerns and suggestions and this is the area of the site that seemed to draw the most disagreement.

However, the main reason for this change is that we’ve decided to focus WattzOn on aspects of your lifestyle that you have direct control over. As important as we feel considering the energy the government uses on your behalf is, there is not a lot a citizen can easily do about reducing its power consumption.  At least not on a short time scale.  So, we’ve transformed your pie chart and total watts to only represent personal energy choices that you could take action to change.  Now, you have the power to reduce the wattage of each of the remaining categories by making sustainable and efficient decisions in your life.

Since we do still think the government calculation is an important metric when evaluating your country and your leaders, you can still find the number on your data page. Speaking of your data page…

Dashboard to Efficiency

As you can see below, we’ve made some pretty big design changes to your profile page to not only better display the data, but to put all of our tools at your fingertips.

From this one dashboard, you can now more easily reach the various areas of your profile.  All of the compare, visualize, and share features have been moved to a single “Explore” box so that you can quickly gain insight into the magnitude of your lifestyle energy consumption and share your results.  The dashboard clearly presents the latest from the forums and recent faceoffs to bring the community features to the forefront.  And, advanced housing features like energy bills and power meter support can be directly accessed here.

We’ll be pulling more and more into this one dashboard view over the next few weeks, so stay tuned! And, of course, please let us know if you there is something specific that you want.

We hope you find these changes as exciting as we do!