Make Your Home Tweet Its Energy Use (Earth Day Project!)
Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.
Just in time for Earth Day, Troast hooked up a TED device to the junction box in his basement and rigged it to transmit data to the net. That real-time data can be viewed online at www.energycircle.com/ted_display.php. By using Google's Visualization API, he was able to create a graph from the data source that's connected to the web. In this case, that's the TED energy-monitoring device. As there are spikes and dips in the graph, a family member annotates those occurrences and those notes are automatically tweeted to a special Twitter account at Twitter.com/EnergyCirclekw.
Since the Troasts started using the device six months ago, they've decreased their energy use by 15%. Now they're wondering if it will drop even more with the world watching their energy consumption online.
Developers, Want to Make Your Home Tweet?
Although not everyone will want to make their data as public as the Troasts have, we know there are probably a few "do-it-yourselfer" developers who have been waiting for a fun project like this to at least hold them over until Google gets their PowerMeter rolling.
Non-developers, try the Tweet-a-Watt system, instead.
Here's how to create your own real-time TED-tweeting home like the Troasts did:
Materials
- TED (The Energy Detective)
- ASUS WL 500G Deluxe wireless router
- OPEN Wrt operating System
- Google Visualization API
Methodology
- You'll need a wireless router that has a USB Port and is capable of running an OPEN Wrt operating system. The Troasts went with the ASUS WL 500G Deluxe.
- Replace the router's existing operating system with the OPEN Wrt operating system (Here's how.)
- A customized script (customized software) has to then be put into the OPEN Wrt operating system. OK, so this is the hard part, Troast says the developers will post the script online at the EnergyCircle blog in a couple of days if there's interest. So if you're interested, please says so in the comments! Without this key piece of the pie, you're left writing your own script. (And if you do, share!)
- Plug the TED into the wireless router using TED's USB port.
- Write the ability to add an annotation to the data into the web site database so that you can annotate the data in the database.
- Write the data display page using the Google visualization API, which enables you to take the data and annotations and make a chart like the one that you see on the EnergyCircle site. (Specifically, they used the Annotated Time Line feature in Google's visualization API).
Note - How the Data Streaming works:
- The script reads output from the TED every second and records it in a file located on the OPEN Wrt router.
- Each minute, the router posts the output into the Energy Circle Database.
About TED devices:
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you can buy routers that have been pre-flashed with open wrt on ebay, which will save DIYers a lot of headaches as it is not easy for non-technical types.
will this work with router with DD-WRT too?
My husband obtained one of these from this company and we are and we are planning a vacation with the savings. Amazing stuff!
What do those spikes and dips indicate? Can you tell when your fridge clicks on or when you are doing the wash or do things calm down at night?
Great spin on Earth Day (from a TED owner).
Looking at this and how easy it is, I'm getting this for my home and business....I might save $1,000 per year!
This has a nice "cool factor" to it, but what do you do with the info?
would be fun to see overall carbon output. electricity is one key thing but what about oil, etc?
Hey all--I'm Peter Troast at Energy Circle.
Sarah--thanks for a great write up.
Elizabeth--in just the first 24 hours of having this online, we've very quickly become aware of what produces each spike. That said, we see some interesting opportunities with data visualization to make this even more powerful. Imagine, for example, the shape of the graph when the dryer runs a full heat for 30 minutes vs 4 hours tumbling on no heat. Will be interesting to see.
Alex--what to do with the data? Perhaps most importantly, it helps you size the loads from various appliances. Produces a new understanding of just how bad the dryer is. Obviously, we knew that intellectually but the power of visual data is strong. That's a start.
Emily--this is a really important point. Electricity is just one source for us. We heat with oil, cook with propane. Figuring out the data capture for these is one of our next priorities.
Sorry, I cannot resist this: what about "make your toe tweet the need of a nail trim?" or "make your dog tweet when it's thirsty?" and "make a plant tweet" - wait, that's been done!
Any age limitations for homes? I know humans must be 13 to use twitter. So new energy efficient homes don't count? ;)
Does it give any data about where in the house the energy is being used?
Peter -- did you identify what the 'A' was? That was quite the hike.
Ever thought about overlaying this information with the real-time cost? Whats the variance of cost per KWH peak to non-peak?
William
Jen--the beauty of the TED approach is that it measures whole house electricity use. So, while the data doesn't specifically identify which particular appliance is causing a spike, with time of day and size of spike we're already finding that the culprits are easily identified. As I said above, we're also working on some data visualizations that may identify the specific appliance by shape of the data.
William--right on. We've only been at this for 48 hours and already we're asking similar questions that could be answered by adding other data streams. For folks with peak/off peak pricing, $/kwh is obviously key. And heating and cooling degree days over time will also be cool to get. We're thinking about it. And, as I've said repeatedly today, getting beyond just electricity is key. We live in the land of oil heat (Maine is 80% reliant) and figuring out how to capture that data is a big priority.
Peter Troast, Energy Circle
Do you guys have plans to release monitoring tools as a free/subscription service on the web? I'd really like a "plug and play" way to monitor my energy consumption and I think a hosted web service would be great way to do that. It would also be really nice if I could check up on my data with a PDA/iPhone. Perhaps even have the ability in the future to turn off lights/appliances I noticed were causing spikes in usage with it too?
Great work can't wait to see what's next!
Here is an interesting mod to tweetawatt to publish to Pachube: http://naughtorious.com/tweetawatt.html In fact you might also check out Current Cost http://www.currentcost.com/ and Pachube http://www.pachube.com/ since Pachube released an application that's pretty much plug and play for getting your electricity usage published to the web, including converting it into a real time carbon footprint, good for consumers as their article says "no hacking necessary"!
Have we heard anything about this script being posted?
At long last, and with apologies that it took us awhile, we've posted the recipe for this here:
http://www.energycircle.com/blog/2009/05/27/ted-open-source-how-we-went-live-with-our-electricity-use/
Welcoming feedback on whether it has sufficient detail, is understandable, etc.
Thanks for the patience all.
Peter Troast
Energy Circle
I've always wanted to buy some sources of energy not to affect the environment. There are so many forces, higher than us that can be used to help us. These ideas are great.
Have we heard anything about this script being posted?
Great spin on Earth Day (from a TED owner).
Does it give any data about where in the house the energy is being used?
This has a nice "cool factor" to it, but what do you do with the info?
My husband obtained one of these from this company and we are and we are planning a vacation with the savings. Amazing stuff!
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