Monitor Household Energy From Your Smartphone

kkleiner writes "People Power 1.0 is an open and extensible cloud-based platform that allows you to monitor up-to-the-minute household energy usage from an iPhone or Android smartphone. Part of the growing Internet of Things, People Power 1.0 brings energy monitoring to the common household. It works through your house router to connect to the Internet and send data to your smartphone. Or you can measure energy consumption from individual devices with People Power's GreenX Powerstrips."

Comments

Burn energy to save energy

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Burn energy to save energy - what's not to like?

But seriously - this is a cool idea. When the price drops to around $2-3 an outlet, I'll outfit my house.

Up next

[Baloroth]

All we need now is an app that monitors how many monitoring apps there are! Otherwise, how are we going to keep track of them all?

kit costs $150

[iamhassi]

This is not free, the kit to hook up to your electricity is $150. I don't purposely leave things on so I don't think I could turn off enough electrical appliances to ever save that $150, it's not like I could turn off the A/C, fridge, etc.

Re:kit costs $150

[malakai]

I got this for free from Con Edison (not this model). They came out, installed it on the mains, and hooked up a little wireless gateway device. I get instant usage reports...etc.

It's value diminishes a bit with time. Early on, I was looking at the charts daily. I really got into optimizing my place for low energy during the day. I could see when my refrigerator cycled on, and later when my A/C systems cycled on. It did lead me to throw away two older A/C units that were drawing way to much power.

The ability to be alerted when you seem to be using unusually more power than normal is good. I had a BeerTender go bad and some cheap Wine Cooler/Refrig unit. Both started using way more energy than they should have w/o tripping the breaker. Also, they give you a little LED status bar that's wireless, and will show you what % of your target daily KW your on track to using. It basically shows you your energy velocity. I.E, it says "if you keep using this much energy, then by midnight tonight you'll be x% through your self-set daily budget." If you go over 100% it turns red. A few times this summer I had full red bars by 10am. Window AC systems are really not efficient.

All in all, I've cut my year to year energy bill by half. In fact, this last month was $200 vs $450 last year. In a few years this will be standard and won't seem unusual, but the data is value added imo.

Re:Why does this need to be on a smart phone?

[geekoid]

habit changes are easier with regular reminders. Like making people think about what they are eating every time they eat helps people control their diet.

Re:Or you can measure energy consumption

[JWSmythe]

    You didn't look over their whole site.

    Their target demographic is businesses, not residential users. But, what business wants to rely on using a cell phone for managing the enterprise? If it's so important that you need it at your fingertips 24/7, you'll have an operations department watching for pesky things like the power going out.

    And the next bit.. If you go to buy something. You can buy T-shirts, tote bags, and exactly ONE piece of equipment. It's their developer board. You can't even buy the outlet strips that they show on the rest of the site.

    But you *CAN* Buy their music or have their band come out to perform for you (for a fee, of course).

    These guys must have some nice offices, right? There's a whole manufacturing and distributation pipeline that they'd require.

Palo Alto. That's no industrial office.

Bejing, China? Nope not that one, that looks like a residential area.

Tokyo, Japan
This isn't residential, but it looks more like a business area, not a manufacturing area. I could be mistaken. If anything, I'd bet there's a mail drop in one of the surrounding buildings. Since I don't read or speak a word of Japanese, I can't guess on which building in the area is the correct one.

I did find some press releases from 2009, where they had a picture of a guy in Japan, and all kinds of talk about saving billions of dollars.

    I do wonder, now that they're trying hard to market themselves, how is AT&T (now owner of Cingular) going to feel about their logo being stolen. I can't imagine AT&T let the trademark lapse. They have entire departments dedicated to keeping their patents, copyrights, and trademarks up to date, *AND* suing the pants off of anyone trying to play with their toys.

    So we're left with a company, with no real product other than their band and self-published CD, with offices in 3 countries, a bunch of forward looking statements, and not much else.

    I think you were pretty close, except they don't even have the outlet strips to sell.

Re:Needs to be granular

[ShakaUVM]

The SmartMeter (that pretty much every house in California has now) will show you instantaneous power consumption. If you're willing to do easy arithmetic and tromp out to the side of your house, you can figure out what the power draws are for everything in your house, without needing to buy anything.

If you know what's on in your house, then, you know your draw. You can even test things under heavy load.

In my house, the AC uses 4x as much power as the rest of the house combined.

That said, I do have a widget hooked up that reports the amount of power my solar system generates, which gets fed to a website I can check from my phone. PVwatch. It's kind of fun.

Re:Needs to be granular

[strength_of_10_men]

This is the exact problem this Powerstrip can solve.

Read the OP's message again. He's talking about the largest consumers of energy in the typical house - the HVAC system. Good luck trying to plug those into their PowerStrip.