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Google Wants To Be Your Electricity Meter
An anonymous reader writes "Google has teamed up with microcontroller maker Microchip to develop an API for a piece of software called Google PowerMeter, according this EE Times story. Why? Because Google wants to host all the details of the electricity and other energy consumption of people's homes. It wants to do this so that it can show people on their iGoogle homepages when and where they are consuming energy so that they can start to reduce their power consumption. The good news is that it is an opt-in service and free so you don't have to make Google your energy-monitor if you don't want to do so."
http://www.microsoft-hohm.com/
Who's following who?
Now the Man can monitor consumption and infer when a weed growing operation is up and running.
Note electricity consumption, cruise by with thermal cameras to verify, profit!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Such a thing (on-line electricity meter) already exists: Flukso
Linux-based with wifi uplink to the net and ethernet to configure it. Handles internet-connection downtime gracefully. Completely open so that you can tweak it if you wish to.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
There already exist devices which allow you to monitor your energy consumption by monitoring the dials in your meter box. For instance the dutch http://www.enymate.nl/artikelen/enymate_lite.
Because this measures consumption by looking at the dial it is also possible to monitor gas and water consumption, and the measurements relate directly to the upcoming bill(s).
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the linked company.
Actually yes. because your power meter is too inaccurate at small reading to give me a difference in 15 minutes. and when you are chasing down parasitic loads it's important.
I use the TED5000 (The Energy Detective) works great, is dirt cheap, and gives me an energy data aggregate that is killer in every way. Plus having a Dollar amount in our faces on the counter every minute of the day really makes you pay attention to leaving the basement lights on all day.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's wrong because it violates the third law of thermofinancials: Bills are always created and can never be destroyed.
I hate printers.
That's what technology is for... so you don't have to do it yourself the hard way.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Actually, yes I do. Throughout the day the cost of power varies widely. At night it is dirt cheap (because it is produced at a coal or nuclear or hydro power plant) but during the day more plants have to be brought online and shut down as the load varies. That makes it very expensive at some times during the day. For residential consumers, this just gets averaged and they get pretty much a flat rate (some places have a time based tier system). But, if I got charged the current price for power, and could have my house decrease or increase power consumption based upon that price, then my cost would go down, and the total cost of the power grid would go down (because the load is more stable). I don't think they should have the ability to force me to turn off any appliance, but it would be good for the whole system if you let the free market determine the price of power through consumers setting their own limits of which appliances can be running at different price points.