Household CO2 Emission Visualizations
Posted by Kyra Edeker
The Victoria, Australia government is running an ad pitching
conservation by depicting an average household’s production of greenhouse
gases. Black balloons sprouting from appliances, lamps and electronics
each represent 50g of greenhouse emissions.
The quiet commercial feels slightly sinister, with the dark balloons
sprouting out of the empty house. It’s an interesting way to wrap the mind
around the gas we’re dumping out with our activities.
While there are now some interesting variations on household energy
monitors, such as DIY Kyoto’s Wattson, I haven’t run across any that depict personal greenhouse gas output. To be effective, the monitor would need to put emissions in context, and calculate emissions based on the energy source for your particular home. One solution would be a mash-up of networked home energy monitors with an online component calculating emissions.
Do you know of any gadgets or interfaces that are displaying not only
energy usage, but greenhouse gas production in realtime?
(link: information aesthetics)
Related posts:
- Sparzähler Online A little bit more about the Yello Google PowerMeter interface...
- Tweeting Energy Use The Edenbee blog has a post today about a...
Tue 6 May 02008
Hi,
Related to this is a design I worked on for a company called Agilewaves.com. They have a energy and resource monitoring system that they sell to the commercial and residential markets. There are screen shots of the user interface in these articles about their most recent project for a private school in Hillsborough, CA. They rolled out the brand new interface for this project. It makes use of a 3D model rendered in SketchUP with actual and accurate modeling of the angle of the sun on the buildings throughout any given day on any day of the year. The angle of the sun is integral to passive solar design and the performance of the green buildings.
http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9916834-54.html
http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/11/agilewaves-gauges-your-homes-greenness/
Btw, they do have a way to visualize carbon emissions in this design which will be included in their new version of their residential product.
Karen
Mon 12 May 02008
There’s a product that has been around for a while called Building Dashboard by Lucid Design Group that visualizes emissions as well as energy use:
http://www.luciddesigngroup.com
Looking through one of the interfaces, I notice you can express consumption in terms of CO2, lbs coal, equivalents hours of CFL use, dollars, etc. Seems that they have a pretty advanced setup — even easier to understand than the Prius display!
Hope this is helpful.
-J
Fri 23 May 02008
Thanks for sharing!