Life With TED - Micromanaging Your Carbon Footprint

I've spent three days watching my power consumption like a hawk, here's how it's going

I've been interested in having a better handle on my electrical consumption for a long time. Our family regularly goes through 1100-1200 kWh a month, and it's been frustrating that I couldn't really get a grip on where or when the power was really being used. I want to get my power usage under control for three reasons:

1. I want to reduce my $180-a-month-and-climbing power bill. Public Service Company of NH (PSNH) has one of the higher electricity rates in the country (we have a nuke we're still paying off, among other things.)


2. I'm seriously investigating adding solar to the mix, now that a 30% federal tax credit, a $6,000 state rebate, and lower prices for the panels have converged. It would be great to get my usage down into the 600-800 kWh average output I've been told I can expect a month from a system, and zero out my PSNH bill on a yearly basis.


3. I'm a firm believer in reducing carbon emissions, I'd like my 14 year old son to have a world to grow up in. I've already cut my fuel oil use in half (to a still awful 250 gallons a month in the winter, but it's a huge house...) Cutting my electricity is the next low-hanging piece of fruit on the tree.

I had been tracking Google PowerMeter, a Google initiative that lets people monitor their energy usage online, but it was only available to customers of electric providers who were using so-called "Smart Meters". Smart Meters send usage data back to the provider, and PSNH isn't one of them.

Then, this week, Google announced on their blog that normal mortals could now order a device called The Energy Detective (or TED, as he's known by his friends...) TED is made by Energy, Inc. out of South Carolina, and consists of a minimum of two components. The first piece is an inductive current measuring device that lives out in your circuit breaker box. The second is a gateway device that plugs into a wall socket and has an Ethernet jack. Optionally, you can also get a stand-alone display, so that you don't need a computer to view your usage.

Wiring the sensor device into your box is fairly straightforward. You clamp the two sensors around the mains as they come into the box. You also have to wire the device to the two "hot" phases of your 220V service (which requires two free breakers in your box on different phases), and a third wire running to neutral. If you have some basic electrical savvy, you can do it yourself, but I decided to wimp out, since my box is so crowded (after-effects of having a transfer switch put in for a generator...), so I shelled out the $85 to have an electrician put it in.

The gateway unit communicates with the sensor unit via signals sent over the house AC. As with anything using the power lines to communicate, I found the unit was very particularly to which outlet I plugged it into. It really doesn't like to share a circuit with a computer, for example. Neither of the two plugs which was actually next to a network hub would pick up a signal, but one in an adjacent room that happened to have a network jack did.

Once you have the gateway talking to the sensors and plugged into the network (it uses DHCP to get an address), you can surf to it using any browser. I can even get to it using Safari on my iPhone. The "home" screen is a dashboard, showing various statistics about current demand and your daily, weekly and monthly averages. You can view the data in terms of kWh, dollars (once you tell TED how much you pay for power, it can even handle peak period and tiered pricing models), or pounds of CO2.

All of the ranges on the dials and bar-graphs are configurable, so if you want 3kWh to be "red", you can set it up that way. You can also configure refresh rates. Clicking on the "Graphing" tab lets you view your usages second to second, minute by minute, or by daily or weekly aggregates.

It's these graphs that I have found to be most useful. You can start to see all sorts of interesting patterns, like the "heartbeat" of my furnace turning on and off at night, when the rest of the house is otherwise quiet.

I can also see the huge hump when my son wakes up in the morning, and proceeds to turn on every first floor light in the house. I was even able to tell that my wife had turned on the dishwasher before she left for school one morning.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 9 June 2009

Biological Radio, Laggy Smart Grids, API Moneys, and Pubsub Server

1. Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar.
2. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that utilities are starting to build out smart grid infrastructure, utilities are largely opting for networks that provide connections that are far from real time, and this could stifle the desired innovation. [...] smart meter data that is pushed to Google’s PowerMeter energy tool has to make its way back to the utility before it can be sent to Google. That means that even for Google’s energy tool, there can be both a significant delay before information reaches consumers, and significant gaps in energy data details. These delays and gaps can undercut the premise of how smart meter technologies will empower consumers to make decisions about their energy use based on real-time costs. Smart grids (houses and devices able to take use of instantaneous pricing changes) have the potential to help us with our energy obesity problem, but the architecture must be right.
3. API Value Creation, Not Monetization -- On the side of the unexpected but interesting outcomes, Kevin said they have seen a flurry of internally developed business applications. In the past many valuable, internal-facing projects were turned down because the programs had to meet strict top line to bottom line ratios. With the availability to data and services, many teams within the company now have access to things they didn’t in the past, and project costs have been minimized. Throughout the company, consumers of the API have been able to launch successful projects that have created additional revenue and have reduced the overall development costs for new projects. Some solid numbers and names to help convince businesses to offer APIs, though the battle is still much harder than it should be.
4. Watercoolr -- a pubsub server for your apps. A channel is a list of URLs to be notified whenever a message is posted to that channel. Clever little piece of infrastructure for web apps, embodying the Unix philosophy of small tools that each do one thing very well. (via straup on Delicious)

Four short links: 27 Apr 2009

Data centers, open research, Jeopardy!, and tombstones

1. Google Server and Data Center Details -- Greg Linden reports on a Efficient Data Center Summit. Google uses single volt power and on-board uninterruptible power supply to raise efficiency at the motherboard from the norm of 65-85% to 99.99%. There is a picture of the board on slide 17. (and this is a 2005 board). Greg has left Microsoft as Live Labs is dissolved.
2. The Economics of Open Access Publishing -- set of papers on the free distribution of research. Pointed to by the RePEc blog. RePEc is Research Papers in Economics, a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 67 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Computer Program to Take On Jeopardy! (NY Times) -- move over Turing Test, IBM's working on the Trebek Test: a computer program to compete against human “Jeopardy!” contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. Really? The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed. Oh, ok. So it's more complex than inverting the hash table of questions and answers. (via ericries on Twitter)
4. The Value of Minimal Data (Powerhouse Museum) -- if you have the ability for passionate users to contribute their knowledge, they can turn "minimal" data into a delicious four course data feast with a vintage port to sip during the dessert course. (via sebchan on Twitter)

Four short links

1. Hahlo - a very sweet-looking mobile (iPhone in the particular) optimised Twitter interface. Although, as I said, every time a Twitter API-consuming web site makes me type in my username and password, a little piece of my soul dies. Thanks to @sogrady for the pointer.
2. Prius as emergency generator - New York Times story about a clever gent who didn't panic during the ice storm, but used his Prius to generate power to see him through.
3. BurnBall, an iPhone game by Kiwi Foo Camp alumnus Tim Haines.
4. Links as a first class object - Ian Bicking makes an eminently sensible suggestion for everyone building a CMS or even vaguely net-aware application.

Bill Coleman to keynote Velocity

Bill Coleman has twice transformed our industry, and I'm excited to announce that he will keynote Velocity later this month. Bill is most famous for being the "B" in BEA and for leading the creation of Solaris while at Sun. He is now the CEO of his new startup, Cassatt, which "makes Data Centers more efficient".

Bill is awesome and I'm really looking forward to his keynote. He is changing the way we think about and manage Data Centers and the software that runs within them.

When we spoke earlier this week he explained how vacuum tubes created the fear of powering down servers, and how funny it is that that fear persists with people that have never seen them. (I've never made that connection as I'm "part of the problem" ;-)

At Velocity, Bill will likely talk about virtualization & efficiency, where he thinks we're headed, and the questions we need to be asking now to get there.

(Many thanks to Tim for suggesting this to Bill and making the introduction.)