Home Energy Dashboards

Peek under the hood of your house.

BY BOB PARKS

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Good science begins at home. I learned this the day the owners of a fancy automated house let me loose inside their place for an hour to check out their energy monitor. I ran amok, letting the jacuzzi fill up, burning toast for no reason, and flipping on and off an expensive plasma slab TV.

The results were intoxicating: a tabletop display What I learned from my hour of prodigal excess, in the kitchen showed pretty, Flash-animated bar however, is that instantaneous data is only the begin-graphs rising to an alarming crest, tallying an exact ning. If I were an actual occupant of the house, I would count of kilowatt-hours, gallons, and therms wasted, have been looking at the historical trends and the and tripping cute animations to point out that I’d energy display’s little advisory messages all along. used more resources than Al Gore’s mansion during It’s the richness of the data that makes it useful. a global-warming fundraiser. After all, Cadillacs sported simple gas mileage

Of course, the whole point of resource monitoring displays back in the 1970s, but it was the triumph is to save energy. But it’s hard to ignore the allure of the Toyota hybrid user interface that gave us the of real-time feedback. Energy’s usually shrouded “Prius effect”: a graphic, 30-minute historical trend in mystery. Your bill comes once a month, and then display that pushes drivers to new MPG goals. who knows what caused a spike or trough in your In a household setting, analysis needs to be even consumption? more sophisticated. A good energy monitor will let

“People need constant reminders of what’s going you filter out high-wattage appliances like toasters or on in their houses, and monitoring your usage can hot glue guns that are only on for a short time, and have a big impact on behavior,” says Ed Lu, lead reveal pesky resource hogs like faulty pool pumps, engineer of Google’s energy monitoring group and a hibernating desktop PCs, always-on stereo receivers, former NASA astronaut. “If I took the speedometer and failing fridges that cause long-term waste. out of your car, you could guess at the speed pretty Says Collin Breakstone, VP of business develop-close, but not that close.” ment for Agilewaves, whose Resource Monitor was

Illustration by Alison Kendall

48 Make: Volume 18