Student charts electrical usage in real-time, much to Big Brother's delight
By Ross Miller 
posted January 19th 2009 11:52PM
posted January 19th 2009 11:52PM
posted January 19th 2009 11:52PM
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Even though it's cool and all... is this necessary?
If you can track this kind of stuff, you can 'collaborate' between appliances when they do their work over a regional scale. This way fridges and other high power appliances aren't doing their major work pulling alot of juice in the day during peek power usage, but at lighter times.
Also, when you track power usage, you can control it to a large degree. If you can compare, say, two coffee makes, one of them might be cheaper to operate over the other. You can apply this to other appliances as well.
Are a lot of things in the world necessary?
....or the FEDS could show up at my "friends" house and wonder why his apartment is using 4 times as much electricity as the other apartments nearby.
And why there is Ultraviolet lamps and hydroponic plant supplies in the bedrooms.
Apparently in NZ you get billed by your power company based on "estimated usage", because it's impractical to check every customer's power meter every month. Most powercos revise the estimate every 3 months, some every month. If this thing can be scaled up (probably a daily/weekly update of total kWh used that day) to every customer of that powerco, we can be billed on actual usage instead of estimates :)
@SIRIUS
Indeed, that sort of thing is already in use in many places in america, my power company records my usage daily and sends it out over the cellular network (also uses powerline networking in some cases). I can then bring up my daily usage online. It's not realtime, but it's better than nothing at all and they have eliminated the need for walking meter readers.
@flashpoint
I am curious why is your "friend" using four time as mush as other people
@sirus
I don't know how they measure my electric but I have two separate rate for my usage, one for peak and off peak I am sure they somehow measure my usage more than once a day or they are just pulling numbers out of their asses
"or the FEDS could show up at my "friends" house and wonder why his apartment is using 4 times as much electricity as the other apartments nearby.
And why there is Ultraviolet lamps and hydroponic plant supplies in the bedrooms."
Your "friend" should stop using so much of his own "product" if he is so out of it he didn't notice the wires and the iobridge the FEDS mounted on his breaker panel.
wait... Flashpoint has a friend? i call shenanigans.
It's more than likely a project as part of his PhD.
Either that, or he just like making those cool squiggly-line things.
(I'd like to buy an 'S').
you only buy vowels...
Of course you can only buy vowels. Have you seen the costs of consonants lately?
Creative application ... primarily using google graphs to plot it, my father has been doing things like this for a few years monitoring electricity production and usage at his vacation home via satellite internet... kind of like a mars base, but closer.
yes usage scheduling could be possible ... this has a better chance of working than waiting fro the utilities to ever do anything through the power lines.
your local pole transformer could ask low priority devices to wait for a while to run using signaling over the power lines and no internet, but like that'll ever happen...
18 Minute shower? Am I the only one disturbed by the length of that? My showers are 5 minutes to 10 minutes tops and I don't see a reason for it to be any longer...
Or two showers of 9 minutes.
Or potentially two people showering at the same time? It is college... why not experiment a bit?
You don't have a girlfriend.
You are correct. I don't have a girlfriend, only a wife.
I take 25-30 minute showers, so 18 really seems quick for me. Who doesn't appreciate standing under extremely hot warmer for a while? It's relaxing.
kyle
here here brother. aint nothing like standing still with ur head getting drenched in water for about 20mins :D
Wurd to Kyle, I've taken half hour showers before. It is very relaxing, and it's a great time to think, plan the day, etc. There's a reason some people have their best ideas in the shower.
I like to waste time.. my AVERAGE showers are close to an hour. I've also fallen asleep in showers dozens of times :)
Short showers suck! Take that!
@ipodrulz
DAMN an hour long!!! thats way to long should top out at half an hour MAX, but thats just from me who used to take 25 min showers. think how much water u waste...
Yes, I am disturbed that someone takes a 18min shower. What I am even more disturbed about, is that some of the above posters take 30-45min showers!! Hygiene is a must, but if you actually wash yourself properly, it takes around 10mins.
You guys seriously need to think about how much water you are just WASTING. Here is the math:
A 'low flo' shower head allows avg. 2.5gpm. An old shower head avg 5gpm.
For the sake of the arguement, not all homes are fitting with Lo flo, and not all are fitting with the old style.
Lets take and average shower head of 3gpm.
Pop of USA (est 7/2008) 300million.
Assuming each person takes 1 shower per day.
Again for the sake of the exercise, lets assume 20% of the population takes a 30min shower.
3gpm x 30min x 20% of 300million = 6'750'000'000gall. (6.75trillion gall)
To put this in perspective, the Hoover Dam has a storage capacity of approx. 9.2 trillion gall...
Therefore, if 30min showers were banned, and everyone took 10min showers, that means there would be a saving of 4.5trillion gall (approx. half of the Hoover Dam) PER DAY. Then multiply this for all the countries around the world,
So, for all who take water for granted, and do not even think for 1sec about how much water you waste, where do you think all this water comes from? Imagine the infrastructure such as pipelines, water treatment plants, chemicals, etc etc needed to have in place just so that you can enjoy a 30min shower.
STOP WASTING WATER!!!!!!!!!!
Disclaimer: I am just an average Joe Plumber, my showers take about 9mins. I am a not a Greenpeace activist, nor am I rabid environmentalist, just a concerned individual.
Cheers,
BigBloke
I end up taking 25-30 minute showers... I usually know it's time to get out when I have to add hot water because it's starting to get cold. ;)
I pay for it. Bite me. The Earth recycles water quite efficiently. I studied Ecology in High school as part of a special project of wetland studies but it extended into Geological filtering. I grew up with well water and a rain water cistern. Maybe California has a problem with it, but in my neck of the woods, water is quite plentiful.
I take my showers in the mornings, right as I get up out of bed on 5 hours of sleep, so the first 10 minutes or so of my shower are just standing under some hot water to wake me up.
Could be useful to minitor the power required to get your computer to run, and make it "greener" whenever possible.
I can also find out how long my showers are by my waterproof watch that I wear so long that it is now organically connected to me.
Yeah, but then you don't know how much money you're wasting on that nice relaxing shower.
I like the showers cold
I hate to take the steam out of the long shower joke... but the water heater heating water for 18 minutes does not reflect an 18 minute shower... it only means it took 18 minutes for the water heater to get the water in the tank above its threshold temperature...
a short shower with a high flow head will cause the heater just as much work as a longer shower with a lower flow head for example... both could result in 18 minutes of heating time.
I would love to put one of these on my new home just so I can use it to compare with my utility company.
Central valley (ca) PG&E just put in digital meters that can report usage via the power lines. They are just using them to avoid having meter readers walk the yards
We've needed something like for a long time. Power companies should do this; they want people to save electricity anyway (contrary to the belief they want to sell more power - it isn't that simple all the time), so something like this would be sweet.
Do we need this spam of yours? really?
Yes, it IS useful. Many utilities are now offering real-time pricing of electricity. The price changes hourly, based on weather and load predictions. In the summer, late at night, the price can even go NEGATIVE, meaning you get paid to take excess load off the grid.
Knowing consumption minute by minute and shifting load to cheaper times can knock down a hefty portion of your bill.
Does he do home installs?
This has a bunch of commercial possibilities. I would like to know what my home looked liked throughout the day, especially when I am not home.
Not exactly anything new. A friend of mine was doing this at univeristy 7 or 8 years ago:
http://offog.org/code/electricity.html
Alex
What... electrical heating of shower water? I can't even begin to tell how wrong that is... Something with overall efficiency, exergy loss.
This has been done before, it even available as a commercial package as of now :
http://www.reuk.co.uk/Plugwise-Energy-Monitoring-and-Saving.htm
not only has it been done before by many individuals but the web service Pachube.com makes this pretty trivial. loads of users are using the service specially for this kind of graphing, putting graphs in webpages, monitoring (and even controlling) electricity consumption, including getting real time carbon footprints. see by way of example:
http://www.pachube.com/search?query=electricity
http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1236
http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1311
You can also buy one here for about $150-200. Includes internet connectivity and a small monitor box to put on your desk to watch consumption:
http://www.theenergydetective.com
@Rik: Not everyone lives in an area with abundant natural gas. Some people even use electric stoves and heat pumps. Wrap that one around your noggin.
Why is this news, devices that do this have been around for years. I designed and build one for my undergrad senior project.
If this was made for a class project and he's a graduate student, I really hope for his sake that there's more to it than just that, I don't know any professor that would accept something this simple as a graduate project.
Geeks often forget that not everyone has their same knowledge and experience. There are many people that see these things for the first time every day. Welcome our 14 (and 40) year old apprentices.... help them learn!
D.
No, this isn't for my PhD. It's just a weekend project. For my PhD research I'm developing a neural implant to detect or abort epileptic seizures.
I put a very obvious power meter (made by Black and Decker) on my meter, and suddenly my bill became much more reasonable. It seems they were just artificially adding to my power bill, and I would randomly get huge ones before that they would make a big fuss about if my landlord called to have rechecked.
Oh, and since I am single and at work most of the time, I use a timer on my water heater. It saves a lot!