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.

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Four short links: 9 July 2009

1. Ten Rules That Govern Groups -- valuable lessons for all who would create or use social software, each backed up with pointers to the social science study about that lesson. Groups breed competition: While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once put in a 'them-and-us' situation, rapidly become remarkably adversarial. (via Mind Hacks)
2. Yahoo! TrafficServer Proposal -- Yahoo! want to open source their TrafficServer product, an HTTP/1.1 caching proxy server. Alpha geeks who worked with it are excited at the prospect. It has a plugin architecture that means it can cache NNTP, RTSP, and other non-HTTP protocols.
3. App Engine Conclusions -- I've reluctantly concluded that I don't like it. I want to like it, since it's a great poster child for Python. And there are some bright spots, like the dirt-simple integration with google accounts. But it's so very very primitive in so many ways. Not just the missing features, or the "you can use any web framework you like, as long as it's django" attitude, but primarily a lot of the existing API is just so very primitive.
4. Microsoft Hohm -- Sign up with Hohm and we'll provide you with a home energy report and energy-saving recommendations tailored to your home. Wesabe for power at the moment, with interesting possibilities ahead should Microsoft partner with smartmetering utility companies the way Google Powermeter does. This is notable because this is a web app launched by Microsoft, with no connection to Windows or other Microsoft properties beyond requiring a "Live ID" to login. For commentary, see Microsoft Hohm Gets Green Light for Launch and PC Mag. (via Freaklabs)

Four short links: 3 June 2009

Video Chat, NGO Incorp, Smart Grid, and Enterprise Sales Funny

1. Tinychat -- very simple web-based take on videochat. Pro members get higher resolution, more rooms, and privacy. (I like the "free = public, charge for private" business model)
3. One Click Orgs -- One Click Orgs is building a website where groups can quickly create a legal structure and get a simple system for group decisions. We think social enterprises, collectives and activist groups have better things to think about than obscure legal clauses. Still getting built, but a good idea. We're one step closer to Charlie Stross's vision from Accelerando of a twisty maze of cross-shareholding organisations whose bylaws are Python scripts.
4. Trilliant Acquisition Signals Next Phase of Smart Grid -- smart grids rely on networked power meters and consuming devices. Therefore there are possible alliances between powerline broadband and smart meter companies, as this union shows. Finally, a use for broadband power? (via monkchips on Twitter)
5. The Vendor-Client Relationship -- should mandatory watching for everyone in enterprise sales. (via johnclegg on Twitter)

Four Short Links: 20 Apr 2009

Camp, visualization, mistakes, and a wireless power meter hack:

1. Toorcamp -- two day hacker camp in a Titan-1 missile silo. The coolest venue evar? I think so.
2. The Allosphere (TED) -- JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the Allosphere, a planetarium-like sound-and-light visualization environment for scientific data. (via Lorrie Lejeune)
3. The Mistake Bank -- The Mistake Bank is a place to share stories of mistakes people have made in their lives and careers. Reminds me of the fail sessions at Foo Camp that Joshua Schachter leads.
4. Tweet-a-Watt (Lady Ada) -- add an XBee card to a Kill-a-Watt power meter to be able to read the current power load from afar.

Radar Roundup: Sensors

Guest blogger Dylan Field is an intern at O'Reilly and Senior at Technology High School in Rohnert Park, CA, where he is a member of the FIRST Robotics team, Dylan is especially interested in Computer Science, Mathematics,and Statistics.

In his "Web Meets World" talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last September, Tim O'Reilly described where he saw the web heading. "The next stage of Web 2.0 is going to be driven by sensors," he said. "We are moving out of the world in which people typing on keyboards are going to be driving collective intelligence applications."

Like all transitions, the incorporation of data from the physical web onto existing platforms is gradual. We are just beginning to see applications surface and the best is still ahead of us. Below are a few observations, predictions, and implementations of this emerging trend.

Sensors Help Keep Elderly Safe
This New York Times article highlights how Seniors are taking advantage of sensors so they can continue to live independently. Sensor systems are able to detect everything from neglected pills to glucose levels to falls. Seniors seem to like the systems, as do their relatives. "In the past, I tried to spend more time on, 'How are you feeling?' " Marvin Joss says. "I still ask those questions, but now it's more to an idea of having a conversation, not trying to listen for clues about whether she's O.K."

The Demon-Haunted World
If I had to use one word to describe this presentation by Dopplr's Matt Jones, it would be "Psychogeography," a term developed by French Theorist Guy Debord. Psychogeography is defined informally as "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape." Jones cites examples like twittering bridges and pollution sensing robotic dogs to back up a claim by architect Richard Rogers that "Our cities are increasingly linked, and learning." "It seems to me like there are a bunch of hackers reclaiming information from the city," says Jones. "[They are] gardening it without permission."

SENSEable City Laboratory
MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory uses sensors to understand the macro-dynamics of cities. For example, in one experiment the lab collected all cellphone usage in Rome for one night. They then aggregated the data and produced a visualization showing how people moved around and where events were taking place. If we had real time access to this kind of information, how would it affect our choices? Would we decide not to eat at a particular restaurant because it is too crowded? Would we choose our entertainment based on the flow of the crowd?

AMEE and Google PowerMeter
AMEE and Google PowerMeter are two ways the "here's your data, do something with it" methodology can be used to make people aware of their carbon footprints. Both use sensors such as smart meters to track and display energy consumption over time. (Disclaimer: OATV is an investor in AMEE.)

In a previous partnership between the two companies, Google used AMEE's profiling engine to let users calculate their carbon footprints. After completing the web form, users were taken to a Google Map mashed up with the carbon footprints of those nearby. Soon, we'll be able to do this without the web form. Like O'Reilly said, we are slowly transitioning out of a world where people typing on keyboards are driving collective intelligence.

What role do you see sensors playing in your life? How do you interact with them now? Does the possibility of sensor driven collective intelligence frighten or excite you? Post a comment and let us know.