Home Camp

Yes, Home Camp 3 – the rise of the monitoring devices – is upon us. It being part 3, we thought we’d take the not particularly logical step of having 3 options on dates - 21 Nov, 28 Nov, 5 Dec -  and we’d like to know which one suits all you lovely Home Camp folk the best.

Tweet your preference to @ohrworm, reply in the comments here or let us know on the Google Group. Whatever does it for you, just make sure you let us know if you want to come any play…

Interesting stuff on the web this week:

• Obama pledges $3.4 billion investment to galvanise the transition to a smart energy grid.
• Google PowerMeter arrives in the UK with a new utility partnership, first:utility, and a new device partnership, AlertMe. The AlertMe device looks nice and easy to use but does come with a sneaky £3/month subscription fee for hosting the data.
• An exciting new partnership between Fat Spaniel technologies and Tendril Networks will result in solar powered houses automatically managing electricity usage in response to the sun’s intensity.
• Sacramento Municipal Utility Department’s Communications Director, Elizabeth Brinton, envisages that the smart grid will enable utilities companies to offer tailor made customer packages to consumers.
• Over on the GreenMonk blog @tomraftery has got his energy chat hat on – check out his take on how utilities companies can use smart meters to generate alternative revenue streams. I’m betting the Spanish version would have involved many more exclamation marks!!!
• And if you haven’t already, check out @edent’s blog about his experiences setting up and using the HummEnergy Duet.
   

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

…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.

Me and Chris are getting the homecamp pitch. We have some evil plans afoot. How about October 24th?

We all love IBM’s Andy Stanford Clark, the seed around which the HomeCamp community initially crystallised, so we’re very happy to have him posting here.

I gave a talk at HomeCamp’08, telling everyone about my home automation system, energy monitoring, and of course my electronic mousetraps. I thought it was time for an update. More recently I’ve linked my automated home up to Twitter, so I get an ambient, background, sense of what’s happening at home, and home much power we’re using.
Like for example, every five pounds worth of electricity each month I get a twitter message. When the phone rings, I get a direct message from twitter to my phone as an SMS, telling me who called, so I can decided whether to call them back.

This recently picked up quite a lot of media attention, and my house appeared on the BBC News – here’s Rory Cellan-Jones’ blog about it -  Things That Tweet and here’s the news piece that went out on BBC and a few other places round the world.

Richard MacManus recently wrote in ReadWriteWeb about the “Internet of Things“, the House that Twitters, and the IBM vision of a Smarter Planet, that is Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s why HomeCamp, and the great community around it, are so important.

And of course, as we move outwards from the home, into the Smart energy grid, we have to work out how to integrate micro-generation capabilities – wind and solar at people’s houses, and manage the recharging of hybrid and electric vehicles. Having everything fitted with sensors, talking to the internet, and applying significant compute power to make sense of that sea of data, becomes increasingly essential to running the system efficiently. This is described in an article in the Guardian recently.

photo credit Benjamin Ellis.

a guest post by homecamper and Quest Software guy Joe Baguley.

It all started one drunken night a few years ago with my neighbours in the garden (as do most life-changing events I’m assured). It appeared that they were all paying an awful lot less for their electricity than me which I found confusing as we lived in similar houses.

Electrisave

After some investigation I discovered the Electrisave (since rebranded as the OWL). £45 later and I had fitted the clamp ammeter to my main feed into the house and was going round the house switching things on and off to see how much they cost. Hours of endless fun, no seriously!

I quickly worked out that my house idled at about 3.4p/hr unless the fridge/freezer was cycling when it hit 5.5p/hr. This small nugget alone dramatically changed household behaviour. Everyone was trained that as we went to sleep, or before we left the house, to check the meter. If it was more than 5.5p/hr then something was on that shouldn’t be and was switched on. Already my bills started to drop by about £10-£15/month.

Then one night I am sitting by the TV, with the meter in front of me (I became sadly obsessed) when it jumped up by 30p/hr to my amazement, something that I thought only the fridge or kettle could do for me, but neither was on. Some investigative work led me to the immersion heater (no gas water heating) and further playing showed me that the cams were worn on the mechanical timer and the thing was never turning off. One new electronic timer later and my bill dropped by a further £30/month and suddenly I was paying less than my neighbours. They were now borrowing my meter to wonder around their homes discovering savings.

Within less than 2 months the unit paid for itself.

Wattson

Ever on the lookout for new gadgets I discovered Wattson and purchased one of their first devices. This did much the same as my Electrisave, but this time allowed me to capture and graph the data using their rather cumbersome app. Now I had usage graphs and could track trends, associating activities with expense. Now I was really starting to annoy my family.

I played with that for a long time, now further rewiring both my study and TV ‘complex’ to ensure that I could switch as much off as possible ‘at the wall’ when I could, leaving only ‘essential services’ powered on 24/7 (Sky+, Cable Modem, NAS drive etc.)

The only problem with the Wattson was that though it glowed pretty colours, the display would show you your ‘estimated bill for the year’ based on current usage, so the thing fluctuated from £350-£4000 as stuff went on and off, but was to abstracted from reality to be useful to drive behaviour with the family compared to the cost/hour of the previous solution.

I was however generally happy with the Wattson, but felt that I needed more info…

GEO

So, along came an Eco show at the Earl’s Court and the discovery of Green Energy Options and their home monitoring plans. They included not only monitoring to an individual device level, but were also looking at my other big and untrackable expense – gas.

So, I begged to get on their beta trial, even though I was well outside their trial area (East Anglia) and through some stroke of luck I was accepted.

I opted for the top of the line unit, the Trio+ at £250 (discounted for the trial) because that was the one that gave me detailed reporting to a device level and included gas.

So a couple of weeks later 2 chaps showed up in my house, placed clamp ammeters about everywhere possible in my consumer unit (fuse box) and installed individual appliance monitors on everything I thought appropriate in the house (washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher, kettle, TV etc.)

The best piece of it all was that the data was all collected onto an EeePC running MySQL, Apache and their own Flash interface which is beautiful and well thought out. More importantly as it is a webserver I can view my house (and turn things on and off) from ‘anywhere’ after opening port 80 on my router and doing the redirect. Here are some sample screenshots:

The number of screens and ways you can view the data are fantastic.

The gas monitoring I am assured will be coming in the next couple of months, but for now the electricity detail is great. The fact it measures cost over time as opposed to one fixed point means you can learn a LOT:

• I now know my dishwasher costs 16p/cycle, compared to my washing machine at 7p, and that running it on the thermonuclear remove the spot-welded lasagne from the dish mode only takes it to 17p. Best suggestion I have had yet is to get all plastic plates and cutlery and wash them in the washing machine. Instead we don’t put the dishwasher on part-full anymore.
• My kettle was costing us near on 50p/week, whereas my new ‘on demand’ model costs us about 6p/week
• The oven is no longer left on for 30-40 mins to ‘warm up’, neither is the kettle left for 20 mins to ‘warm up’. These things get hot very quickly nowadays.
• Taking into account both the cost of food and energy used in cooking it, the chip shop is wallet friendly in some cases…
• My ‘little 3kW pool heater’ we use in the summer for our 10’ pool costs about £9/day to run – kids now cope with it a little colder than 33C…
• My 40” Sony LCD TV costs hardly anything to run (60-70p/week) – fabulous
• The over 1500W of GU10 spotlights downstairs are killing us, and we are trying to find acceptable either CFL or LED replacements, none found yet but some are on their way to me this week to try.
• Laptop power supplies left plugged in are a BAD thing.
• My wife hates it when I am travelling and phone her up to complain about the amount of TV she has been watching instead of doing the housework…
• My kids know that I can turn their TV off from anywhere in the world…

My next big step? – gas monitoring when they fit it. I will finally be able to answer the question this winter as to whether leaving the heating on all the time on a thermostat or turning it off at night and then reheating the house in the morning is best.

Footnote: What drove me to do all this was not only a fascination with tech, but more importantly a fascination with not wasting money. Not saving the planet – saving cash. In my experience cash beats morality every time…