The start page also features an advert with the tongue-in-cheek notion of “painting” with the PowerMeter.

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The Edenbee blog has a post today about a sweet-looking smart meter (designed by IDEO) from German utility company Yello Strom, that integrates with Google PowerMeter and Twitter.  While it may not seem very practical to stream energy data through Twitter, it’s offerings like this, that open up the energy data stream, that will enable the kind of third-party experimentation and innovation that is sorely needed in the space.  BusyBee points out,

While adding Twitter to their mix will undoubtedly give Yello Strom a PR-boost, the larger goal is to feed energy data into any tool customers may be using. As explained by Yello Executive Director Martin Vesper, “Our goal is to use as many different channels as possible to inform our customers about their energy consumption.”

See also this original posting at Springwise.

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With the iPhone platform there is definitely a lot of potential for bringing these types of tools into the social sphere – each of these could be turned into interfaces for web-based hypermiling competitions with friends, for example.

AccuFuel

As with all of these apps, AccuFuel focuses on changes in your odometer and the amount of fuel you get at the pump. I have played with this one a bit. It has a nice widget feel to it – simple interactions and easy data entry. You can set it up to track mileage for more than one car and flip through them just as you can flip through multiple cities in the iPhone weather app. This is more graphical than most – trends over multiple time frames are shown graphically. By Appigo.  ($.99 in iTunes)

Car Care

From the look of it, this app gives you a little more power, if you want it. It does a little more than mileage tracking – you can use it to set car maintenance reminders, which may be handy if you base such things on distance driven. It looks like there’s a little more granularity for those that want it – you can track city vs. highway miles, regular vs. super/premium fuels, and price. There is an import feature if you’ve been keeping data on your computer. This one also has a little visual design and a graphical trending screen. By KB Productions. ($4.99 in iTunes)

CarStat

CarStat uses more of a tabular layout and straight-up data entry approach.  I appreciated that CarStat starts up with some “dummy” data to show me how it works right off the bat.   I think that some of the interactions, such as the way the user calculates averages and totals, could be rethought to create a more fluid experience.  Calculation is naturally at the core of these types of applications, but I think moving these concepts beyond numbers — and into the experiential — is important. By Cogstorm. ($1.99 in iTunes)

FuelGauge

FuelGauge has a pretty attractive home screen (below) showing how my energy use is trending.  There are a few things about FuelGauge that remind that sometimes precision and power don’t always improve the experience — for example, telling FuelGauge I pumped 5 gallons takes 7 taps – some of them zeroes in “5.000″, since FuelGauge always wants its values to the third decimal place.  I expect for an app like this, I will usually want my interaction to be as quick as possible.  But it seems the developer of FuelGauge is putting a lot of attention into future iterations of the app so it may be one to watch.   By iphonecodemonkey. ($.99 in iTunes)

GasHog

Like CarStat, GasHog uses more of a tabular layout and straight-up data entry approach. I have not tried it out, though from the screenshots, it looks executed smartly, if a little dryly.   Again, I think moving these concepts into the experiential is important for engaging a lot of people.  Only geeks like you and me will really put up with a ledger book approach.  By Adair Systems. ($.99 in iTunes)

Miley

I haven’t tried this one out, but it looks like it has a little character and playfulness to it.  As we’ve seen here on Green Interfaces, fuel economy calculators don’t tend to have much of a human touch, so I like the effort.  Reviewers in iTunes also comment that Miley has great tips for helping improve economy, giving it an educational function that some of these lack.  By BunsenTech. ($1.99 in iTunes)

Mileage Tracker

Mileage Tracker seems to have gone a similar route as CarStat and GasHog – tabular data entry interface.  By Lemdisyn.  ($.99 in iTunes)

Tankbuch

Tankbuch comes from developers in Germany, and is available in English, French, and German.  It has the added advantage of being free – but users in the United States will probably not find it usable as only km/l units are available.  By osXwerk.  (Free in iTunes)

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I can attest to the Kill-a-Watt’s usefulness, but I also found it kludgy, difficult, and uninspired. Yet, it’s the only product of its kind on the market in the United States. While I am glad that it’s available, I think that some basic usability problems with the device would have been avoided with a little user testing.

(I have heard that there are many such devices on the market in Europe and elsewhere, and would be interested in hearing if the others’ product designs — or lack thereof — are comparable.)

Button overkill

The Kill-A-Watt seems to give you a lot of power, what with all its buttons, one for each unit of measurement — but really, do I need to know the Volts, Amps, Hz, or VA of my Ikea lamp?* Actually, I only want to know about Watts, since that is the energy language I speak, as a home user. I’m not drawing up schematics or breaking out the soldering board. The device hasn’t yet outgrown its roots on the electrical engineering geek’s workbench.

This device doesn’t need any buttons. Let me connect a device to it, and make a Wattage reading: and I’m done. If the maker wants to make several units of measurement available, one button would suffice to make the setting, and the default should be Watts.

Those hard to reach places

Basic assumptions in the form factor design of the Kill-A-Watt present problems for me once I start to test appliances around the house. It plugs directly into a wall, and its LCD display is on the front face, so to make any readings I need to crouch down on the floor. That’s even more than a little annoying if I want to test the stuff that’s plugged in behind the couch.

One potential solution would be to place the display on the top of the device, so that I can make a reading from above. Even then, the display might still be hard to read if it’s in a cramped space, since it lacks a backlight. My solution is to plug the Kill-A-Watt into an extension cord, so that I can use the Kill-A-Watt like a handheld device. That way, I can make readings where it would otherwise be hard to read, and also test appliances plugged into outlets that simply won’t fit the Kill-a-Watt.

The Kill-A-Watt is only easy to use if you plug it in to an outlet at eye-level (preferably a workbench), and bring your stuff to it. Most of us, I’d wager, just want to test our appliances where they are.

Testing over time

You can also leave an appliance plugged in to the Kill-A-Watt for a length of time and make a reading of its accumulated kWh usage. This is certainly useful, since the energy many appliances pull oscillates or varies with types of use. My laptop computer, for example, might use 25 watts using a word processor, but 70 watts running a game.

This kind of measurement also hints at the kinds of calibration the Kill-a-Watt enables you to do. When I first tested a bunch of my home appliances, I jotted down the initial Watt reading for each and moved to the next. That helped me identify those weird vampires I didn’t expect* — on this first pass I removed over 100 Watts of continuous energy suck from my tiny apartment. (Chief among my strategies: power strips and just uplugging stuff when I’m not using them) Later, I took more time and measured my commonly used things over a period of a few days, to get a better look.

A transition device

The Kill-a-watt represents the kind of cheap and simple interface we need immediately, as it may be years before the average home is equipped with smarter metering and ambient feedback devices. The market has yet to be really explored, as far as I can tell. I think even small improvements in its usability, and a modest, incremental extension of its functions (perhaps adding easy upload of your appliance data to a computer via USB) would bring us a little closer to more efficient use of home energy.

* I found that my Ikea lamps, by way of poorly designed power adapters that apparently like to stay warm for no reason, pulled 6 watts on average when turned OFF.

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Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA), reveals the emissions of power plants and electric utilities across the world. Its database contains information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies.

(CARMA is produced and financed by the Confronting Climate Change Initiative at the Center for Global Development, an independent and non-partisan think tank located in Washington, DC.)

You can search for your city, or your energy provider, and get a fairly straightforward impression of the carbon impact of electricity sources. The information is organized cleanly, so that a glance will show an energy source’s relative emissions and energy output, and you can drill down for details if you want.

The site uses worthwhile visual cues to indicate the intensity of emissions at a source; each energy source gets a simple icon that encapsulates emissions data and the amount of energy generation. The “clean-to-dirty” scale gets cued with color (yes, that’s right: it’s green to red), and the energy output changes the icon size.

The web interface also provides a potentially engaging Google Maps mashup showing the “dirtiest” and the “cleanest” plants, although I found that it doesn’t behave as I’d expect. I want to be able to zoom in on regions and reveal details according to my level of zoom. The zoom functionality on the maps aren’t built that way; you need to use the web site to navigate to a region (or energy provider), and the map on that page reveals corresponding information.

All in all, this looks like a stellar project, and I encourage you to play around with it for a little bit. To software people, one especially interesting aspect of the project will naturally be its API, which enables third parties to access the data and use it for unimagined uses, and essentially give users impressions of the information in new ways.

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Most carbon footprint calculators, for example, use national averages of co2-per-kWh. Fortunately, however, there is one from safeclimate.net (there may be others; I’m not sure) that asks you what state/province and country you are in, and accounts for that in its calculations. That’s better, certainly, though I’d argue that there’s still a long way to go before these calculators are where they need to go.

Designers and engineers need to get cozy with measurements like co2/kWh (pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour), as we give users information appropriate to their context. Utilities need to provide feeds of emissions data along with the energy they’re serving, so that information appliances can utilize them along with utilizing the energy.

We need to move away from the idea that a typical user will do the research and data entry required for most kinds of footprinting, and instead think in terms of augmenting all of our consumables with footprint data. When I buy electric energy, data about where it comes from and its impact should come to my house as well. (AMEE, an initiative based in the UK, is indeed something to watch in the area of CO2 data; it is “designed as a neutral platform to aggregate and distribute all the CO2 data in the world. It combines measurement, profiling and transactional systems to enable this.”)

At the core, though, we’re talking about assisting people with making informed choices, and persuasive information design. Until that pie in the sky appears, there are some interesting projects already underway that will take us part of the way.

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