Would you publish your household's energy usage on the Internet?

After reading about what you are doing; I intend on investing in an T.E.D. and publishing my power consumption on the web in the near future. In addition to helping you reduce your energy consumption, you would also be able to confirm your home has electricity which is important in the winter when you are traveling.

I recently read a great article by Alan Meier on Home Energy Magazine.com (link below) which suggests that power companies should publish your neighbor's energy consumption to indicate where you are in comparison to your peers.

http://www.homeenergy.org/blog.php?id=45&blog_title=March/April_2009_Edi...?

I'd put my home electricity usage on the web and I will. I'm not there yet though, so this is just a progress report.

My first step was to borrow an Energy Detective (TED) from a friend. I hope he lets me keep it long enough to complete this project. I really should get my own.

I had some trouble getting TED to work reliably. It has problems in some houses with electrical noise masking the packets sent from the transmitting unit to the display unit. It took almost a week of trying different wiring arrangements before I could get my display unit to reliably receive the packets that the transmitting unit was sending. In the end, I had to use extension cords to make the connection, bypassing the maze of old wiring in my 1830's house.

The next challenge was to get the TED data onto my laptop without using the Footprints software. I use a Mac instead of a PC so Footprints was ruled out, unless I wanted to install Windows on my Mac, which I don't. So I looked around the web for software to do that, which is when I discovered what energycircle has been up to. Even though energycircle has promised to publish their method of showing live electricity charts (c'mon guys), I decided to try to do it on my own.

I soon found that hackers have been playing around with TED and that software is available on the web to upload TED data to my laptop. I was able to get it running on my Mac with some help from my son who is a computer wizard -- I'm not.

Once I got the data to my laptop, I needed a way to graph it. So I looked into the google visualization software that energycircle is using. This is slick software and, once it was up and running, I could see my electrical usage, and, more importantly, explore the data to identify where all those kilowatts were going.

But as I fed more and more days of data to google's software, I found that it ran more and more slowly. That's when I realized why energycircle had to reduce their resolution from the 1 sample per second that TED provides to 1 sample per minute that they publish. I don't think this is good enough resolution to identify where the electricity is going, at least after the fact. So I looked around for more efficient software.

My son put me on to rrdtool, very popular open-source software that computer sysadmins around the world use to monitor the health of their computers. It's designed for time series data, just like what TED provides. I'm now able to graph the TED data with rrdtool, although that required me to learn a whole lot more of the python programming language than I had expected to. The next challenge was to get the graphs onto the web.

That's when my son told me about collectd, another open source sysadmin tool which collects data from different machines over a network. I'm now in the process of getting collectd to work so I can collect my TED data from a remote server and publish it on the web.

Whew! I didn't mean to write so much. I'll provide periodic updates on my progress here if anyone is interested.

On a different note, here is an XKCD cartoon for the energycircle folks: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/decline.png

David

Thank you.

David --

I am most impressed. The stuff that you're struggling with, as I am, is getting the data from the reader (TED) into the computer. I have a different device (BlueLine PowerCost Monitor) which works a little differently, and has no data export ability.

In general, I think there are two key additional parts: 1) getting the data from the source(s) wirelessly, and 2) having a low-power-consuming device that's smart enough to send the data to a central server.

The wireless part could be the regular wireless signal used for WiFi (802.11), but a new standard called Zigby is what seems to be getting baked in to most Smart Meters, as well as other things (e.g. GE's new appliances). It would be cool if TED or the BlueLine could produce a wireless signal that could be read by devices other than the TED itself. Indeed, I think they would just need to publish their specifications and some intrepid engineer would be able to figure out how to read it.

The second part is to get the data to some place on the web. This is "easy" from a programming perspective, but you need either a regular computer, or some specialized component that knows just how to do this. I spent a fair amount of energy getting rid of the old Dell PC I had running all day and night which would do the job nicely, but it was drawing 116W, and more importantly, not something that most people have sitting around in their houses.

The Google Power Meter project does both of these parts -- their servers are the place to send to, and the Smart Meter is the source of the data. I think the data is sent over the electrical wiring itself, but not sure on that point. SmartMeters and utilities that enable them make all of this stuff go away.

Pretty cool, all in all.

Tom,

I agree, for the most part, with your big picture. It would be very convenient if TED sent data to my laptop using WiFi or Zigbee, instead of through the household wiring, which, in my experience, isn't very reliable.

But wireless can be unreliable also. For example, I've played around with the BlueLine PowerCost Monitor and had a lot of trouble receiving the wireless signal when I put the display in my kitchen. Admittedly, my kitchen is about 40 feet and four walls away from my electric meter, but the PowerCost Monitor really needs a stronger, more reliable wireless signal. (I had other problems with the PowerCost Monitor -- but that's a discussion for another time.)

I have high hopes for Google's PowerMeter as well, but I can't wait until my electric company (NationalGrid) gets around to installing a smart meter on my house. That could take years.

Ideally, Google would provide an interface to PowerMeter so that TED data (gathered with collectd or TED's Footprint software) could be displayed on their site. But I'm not holding my breath on that one either.

One approach to gathering whole house electric data that also needs to be explored is based on the wireless signal used in Automatic Meter Reading. My son pointed out to me that our own meter is probably sending out such a signal continuously, since the meter reader never comes to our house anymore. Poking around on the web, I found that modern meters do indeed send out a wireless signal, one strong enough that it can be read by a car driving by on the street. I found several discussions about how to reverse engineer this signal and even one guy who claims to have done it. But TED seemed easier at the time so I haven't pursued this lead. For someone without a TED, this might be worth looking into.

I also appreciate your concern that the computer gathering TED data not use too much energy itself. For the present, I am using my Mac laptop for this purpose and it's pretty efficient -- about 20 watts when it's running collectd and 17 when I set the screen at half brightness. But this won't work long term because my laptop needs to be portable, so I'll have to come up with some other arrangement. It would be nice to have a smart TED device that would forward the data to PowerMeter but then I would be locked into whatever displays Google comes up with.

Finally, let me mention that I love your blog (http://fivepercent.us). I learned so much from it.

David,

You were very ingenious. We got our TED about a year and a half ago (May 08), without Footprints software because they didn't have a MAC version, but they said the would soon. I guess they decided to take a different approach with the new 5000 model which connects to the Web. Is there any simple way to data log the the TED data without all the work that you went through? I don't need one second resolution; we have cut our use almost 30% without that kind of detail (down to 2200 kWh/year for a 1900 sq ft house with 2 older residents). I recently ask the TED makers if I could use the 5000 gateway to the web with the older TED 1000 MTU. But I have not gotten a reply. I would like some easy way to log some data to my MAC or even the Google Power Meter without too much hacking.

Hey All,

I've been watching the EnergyCircle for some time as our little team over in Australia has been working on the smartenergygroups.com project.

What we are about to release to the interwebs is a simple DIY kit that uses open source hardware and software to record energy consumption and get it onto the internet without doing anybody's head in. If you can solder up a few parts it will be a cinch!

Our kit uses the Arduino open source microcontroller, for which we've designed a 6 channel shield (extension board). This then will talk wirelessly using Zigbee using an open protocol to an OpenWRT internet gateway. OpenWRT is a cut down embedded linux system that can be flashed onto a huge range of small wireless routers.

The OpenWRT machine then collects the data transmitted wirelessly from a number of sensors, ie. It's possible to have a whole constellation of energy meters, temperature sensors, switches etc, and put's it up webside.

The whole idea of this project is to open source the hardware, giving people access to tools, knowledge and learning and we may be able to just solve this.

If you'd like to learn more about our open source SEGmeter kit head over here
https://smartenergygroups.com/samotage/posts/65-The-open-source-energy-m...

If you'd like to have a look at my house, you can check it out here!
https://smartenergygroups.com/groups/sams_home_energy

Sam,
@samotage

Hey Peter & Tom,

Now anyone can post their usage on the internet with Wattzy.com.

Check it out -- it's free!

thanks,

Alex