One Simple Thing IV: Monitor Your Energy Use.

As many of you know, we began live-streaming our household's electricity usage to the Internet on Tuesday.  We have been monitoring our electricity use for several months, and during that time we have been alerted to a number of changes that we could make to reduce our usage. In fact, we have reduced our electricity bill by about 15%. As we have repeatedly pointed out, we eagerly await Google Powermeter, which we hope and expect will make those kinds of savings available to more homes. It was our hope that the singular gesture of going public might hurry along that process.

While we decided to launch our "Own Your Energy and We Will Own Up to Ours" campaign during Earth Week, it does not end today. Check back and see how much we've learned, and how low we can go.

The response from our customers and the press has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, which has confirmed our suspicion that homeowners are interested in having tighter reins on their energy. While we acknowledge that we had some fun retrofitting our TED, The Energy Detective, and there is an element of gimmick to putting our raw data on the internet, this is not a game. As Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote on BoingBoing,

Each day this week we have highlighted a video that captures some aspect of Earth Week, championing an energy efficiency incentive that is easily accomplished and powerfully effective. Today we are featuring the buyer's guide for whole-home electricity monitors. More than anything else,  our experience has affirmed the effectiveness and the importance of energy monitoring, whether or not the world is watching you do it.