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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Yet another energy awareness savvy article appears this weekend in the New York Times.  It discusses the powerful motivator of friendly competition to modify energy use behavior.  When people have a notion of normal behavior, they tend to change what they do.

Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, studies how to get Americans — even those who did not care about the environment — to lower energy consumption. And while there are many ways, Dr. Cialdini said, few are as effective as comparing people with their peers.

In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

“It is fundamental and primitive,” said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.”

A couple of programs mentioned in the article:

BrainShift Foundation Energy Smackdown

Central College PODS Dorm

Quality Attributes Software Green Touchsreen used on the PODS Dorm

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In recent weeks, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, has hinted at the company’s broad interest in the energy business. He also joined Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, to announce that they would collaborate on policies and technologies aimed at improving the electricity grid. The effort could include offering tools for consumers.

Meanwhile, engineers at Google are hoping to unveil soon tools that could help consumers make better decisions about their energy use. (Emphasis added)

Of related interest, for those not familiar with Google.org’s green initiatives, it’s worth taking a look:

RechargeIT: An “initiative that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles.”

RE<C: “RE<C will work to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that is cheaper than electricity produced from coal.”

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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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Houston Chronicle photos

Two recent front-page articles in mainstream city newspapers covered the emergence of smart metering in Texas. I think it’s a good indication that these technologies and devices are nearing the mainstream here.

The Austin American-Statesman covered the installation from the perspective of utility efficiency and demand management. (Austin Energy has a pilot program for consumer meters, too).

The Houston Chronicle reported on smart metering from the consumer perspective, and while there was some fairly incomplete reporting on the costs — a lot about the costs to cover the new technology, and not much about potential savings — there were also a few interesting nods to customer experience in the article. For example,

[Reliant Energy CEO Mark] Jacobs thinks smart meters could change the way Americans use power for the better. The key is an intuitive user interface that doesn’t overwhelm the user, he said.

“It’s incredibly important we get the customer experience right with this,” Jacobs said.

The Statesman also published a smart Associated Press article that covered smart electricity from end-to-end.

It’s interesting to see some of the visual interfaces that the newspapers use to inform these articles. I have a thought that as these images begin to enter the visual vocabulary of the mainstream, the early impressions will shape what consumers will come to expect from these tools. Some of the earliest interactions — say, the ability to program your home to go low-power during the day, from your Blackberry — may also become conventions consumers will come to expect.

Austin American-Stateman photo

Links:
Austin American-Statesman:
Austin Energy installs automated electric meters
Brains for power grids

Houston Chronicle:
Power meters getting smarter

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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)

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Dan Lockton writes about the Orb on his blog, Architectures of Control: Design with Intent:

Recent design graduate Harry Ward’s Orb energy monitor is especially attractive: a toroidal inductor is clipped around the cable being measured, and transmits data wirelessly to the Orb itself, a hand-held unit which glows different colours depending on the power being drawn. The display on the Orb could show the user the direct electricity cost and CO₂ emissions equivalent, as well as the actual power being used and cumulative energy (kWh) used over a period.

In an email, Ward described the key principle in his design: it was to be a “a real-time energy monitor that made the concept of ‘energy monitoring’ simple and understandable.”

There are several levels to the monitoring: “First, ‘at-a-glance,’ whereby the consumer can instantly understand what is happening, by a coloured glow. Next, digital figures are available to justify the glow. Finally, the product has a self-learning feature, that uses historical consumption data to provide comparison for the user.”

I asked Ward why he felt that a product like this is important, and he replied, “I felt, as I do now, that as energy prices rise and the pressure to reduce CO2 emissions increases we will need to be able to look at what we use and when – at the point of consumption (ie not in a bill 3 months later!).”

Developed originally as part of a final-year product design project for his degree, the end product may differ from what we’ve seen thus far. So, consider the product we are seeing here a preview of a perfected design we’ll see later on.

Ward wrote that during the process of design, he “did prototyping whilst developing the product at the workshop that was available at my University. Its a very useful process that I would say is essential to ensure the product design is achievable on a production level. The orb, as it displayed in Dan Lockton’s website, is the creation from my degree after various attempts at different designs. I settled on the tactile shape to encourage the user to use the product around the home. Since then, the product has had many other embodiments.”

The design is being finalized now, and plans are underway to get the Orb into production in the next year. I’ll keep you posted.

Photo courtesy of Harry Ward

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