TED 5000 and Power Meter are talking at Energy Circle.
We have long believed that Google PowerMeter is the new frontier in home energy management, promising as it combines the benefits of real time monitoring and the potential to access whole house energy data. We know that measuring and understanding electricity usage is the first step to making significant savings, and we've trumpeted each step of PowerMeter's development. We've been pretty much holding our breath, waiting for a chance to access the real-time display and fire storm of data that Google PowerMeter makes possible.
Until today, however, there has been only one way to access Google PowerMeter: work for Google, and be one of the 100 lucky employees granted the opportunity to test it. The second wave of access to Google PowerMeter has felt a long way off, because it has been inextricably linked to smart meters, which utilities have slowly been attaching to houses for their own purposes, with a worrying lack of interest in providing real time data to homeowners.
We are impatient sorts, so we rigged up the closest imitation of a power meter we could. We have used our TED 1000 to monitor our home energy use for over a year, and beginning last April, we rigged our TED to the Internet, projected our real-time usage on our site, and annotated the peaks and base load stats on a Twitter account: @EnergyCircleKW. While we knew that Google was considering linking up with consumer monitoring devices, we didn't know until this week that Google would also pick TED as the monitoring device of choice.
In fact, we had grudgingly accepted that our own make-shift real-time monitoring project was as close as we'd get to Google PowerMeter - until/unless our utility company implemented smart metering. We were wrong. As of today, we and anyone else who purchases a TED 5000 has access to Google PowerMeter. The TED 5000, is a sleek, wireless, Mac and Linux compatible upgrade to the TED 1000 series we have long championed. In addition, TED 5,000 allows you to view your electricity usage from your laptop, mobile phone or iphone.
Most importantly, TED 5000 makes Power Meter's free software interface possible without a smart meter for the first time. Using a firmware upgrade released a few hours ago, we have hooked up our TED 5000. Here is a screen shot of Google PowerMeter in action, with our current data:
We recently had the opportunity to speak with Google Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives Dan Reicher, and learn that this development, while significant, is only the beginning. Google is working hard to integrate PowerMeter to monitor energy beyond electricity. This is a crucial next step, and another development we will eagerly anticipate.
Comments
The PowerMeter is another great idea from Google
Posted by MaryDavidge on Oct 9, 2009 3:22pmWill Google host the historical data? I just received my TED and I'd like to run the analysis on the 1 minute resolution, but TED itself will only store a short window at this level. If google is willing to store the data, the sky's the limit!
Posted by Daniel on Oct 12, 2009 5:28amMary--I agree. It's fairly basic so far, at least from the standpoint of us geeks who've been at the real time monitoring game for awhile, but for the vast majority of people who have nothing more than a meter on the side of their house, seeing a graph of your electric use is transformative. Thanks for chiming in.
Peter
Posted by energycircle on Oct 15, 2009 5:49amIt's too bad that us Ted 1000 early adopters don't get the google integration. Does anyone know if Google plans to release the powermeter API to integrate 3rd party products? I use the ted 1000 with my linux box and have a python script to read data off of it. It seems that uploading this to a site like powermeter for reporting shouldn't be too hard, as long as the API is public.
Posted by Brandon Tallent on Jan 21, 2010 8:26amBrandon -- currently the PowerMeter API is accessible only to utilities and device partners, notably TED. I assume Google will make it more easily accessible at some point, but the main thing to wonder about, I think, is what the API will allow one to do.
Privacy issues are key -- I find it unlikely that Google would allow direct access to anyone else's data, for example because it would be pretty easy for a thief to see when the house is occupied and not.
I guess we'll have to see where Google goes with this -- in my mind, the ability to compare and aggregate household data over many houses is where the real juice is. It's nice to see my usage in a pretty graph (actually, more than nice, it's very cool and helpful), but seeing multiple houses, doing competitions, comparisons, and the like seem far more interesting to me in the longer run.
Posted by Tom Harrison on Jan 21, 2010 11:25am