Together with people (Dominique Guinard, Markus Weiss and Tobias Graml) from the BitsToEnergy lab of ETH Zurich we are actively working on a Web of Things system that helps people to better understand their energy consumption.
A major burden for people, who want to save energy at home, is for them to identify how much energy is consumed by different appliances. How much does my computer consume in operation / when it is powered off? Is the consumption of my energy-saving lamp significantly lower in the long run than the normal lamp I’ve got there? Such questions are key to understand where energy can be saved without too much effort. Currently available solutions, such as pluggable power monitors, are helpful, but do not fully fit the needs of individuals. They lack demonstrating power such as being able to compare consumption on a centralized screen, in an appealing manner.
In this project we implement a system that’s very simple to set up and that can be used in everyday life. All you need to do is to get a number of Ploggs and plug them on the appliances you want to montior. Then, our software finds all the Ploggs in the environment and makes their functionalities accessible through a dynamic web page as shown below:
The interface offers six real-time graphs. The four graphs on the right side provide detailed information about the current consumption of all the appliances currently available (i.e. attached to a Plogg). The two remaining graphs show the total consumption (KWh), and respectively a comparison (on the same scale) of all the running appliances.
A more geeky description of that system is available in this post.
The software will soon be available for download here so stay tuned!
