Home energy monitoring is a hit at BarCampLondon7

Thanks to @adamcohenrose for letting us upload his notes from the home energy monitoring talks at BarCampLondon7. Check out his blog here: http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/

Saturday, 24 October 2009 BarCampLondon7: Energy Efficiency & Usage Monitoring

Nigel Crawley

• digital meter — LED flashes fast or slow depending on how much electricity you use
• can pick that up with an arduino with wifi and then make available as EEML
• EEML (eeml.org) — XML for electricity cost
  • can humm output eeml?
• can then input into Pachube
• can then do visualization like this:
• lilypad arduino — can sew into clothes
  • can include a vibra-ball
• can recognise individual devices by whole home electricity usage
  • fridge, kettle, toaster, electric oven
• Tom Raftery — greenmonk.net
  • devices using too much electricity — an organisation will offer to replace it and tell you the savings
  • Camden, New Jersey: government offers subsidies on lower energy appliances
• visualisations:
  • one for schools that showed a polar bear running out of iceberg
  • DisplayLink have done a blog post on energy visualisation

Gbenga Kogbe

• the UK will run out of energy by 2014… we must save
• comparing with your neighbours
• mancini project — plug by plug usage
• there was some effort in the Zigbee standard — all appliances would publish their usage to a standard hub
• energyhive provided reduced price meters
  • research that came out showed that by the end of the trial, loads of meters were in the drawer and not used
  • several 1000 homes included in trial
• putting information online and sharing it is much more effective than a little meter in the corner
• in some places, there are dynamic tariffs
  • would like to tell dishwasher to wash when it’s cheap
  • not in the UK…
  • energy providers buy at realtime, but sell at flat rate
• Dale Lane: energy costs vary between 2p and £3 a unit!!
  • it’s in their interest to get us to use it at the right times
• base electricity is provided by nuclear power
• peak is provided by hydro
• DynamicDemand.co.uk: figure out national supply by checking frequency
  • brownouts caused by frequency going too low
  • looking at making fridges turn themselves off when the frequency is lower
  • if all fridges did this, then peaks would be made less
  • see also caniturniton.com
• in California they have battery farms (since the 80s)
• solar panels are less efficient in the heat…
  • they get powered by light, not heat
• bike generators:
  • bikes available for free — have generators
  • when they are parked, they provide their power for the local buses

Some interesting stuff knocking about on the web…

…from a week or so ago.

• Microsoft positions itself as the platform that can integrate smart energy tech with SERA.
• Germany takes a giant leap into the energy revolution with, among other grand plans, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology’s E-Energy scheme. Billed as “intelligent networking of energy generation, distribution and consumption”, 6 projects are being piloted which place the empowered consumer at the heart of the energy marketplace. You can check out the full E-Energy story here (PDF alert!).
• Google PowerMeter get the energy detectives on the case with the TED 5,000 partnership.  Thanks @divydovy for flagging that one up.
• The Guardian gets excited about a new smart meter from Intelligent Sustainable Energy. Any Oxford Home Campers had a sneak peek at this one?
• And it looks like the Home Camp concept has caught on over the pond. The premier conference eh? I guess that makes us the protopremier unconference.