Blog 1 of a 5 part series

A few months ago I posted a blog about real time electricity monitoring and how studies show this generally reduces power consumption.  At that time I had just started a side project to monitor our electricity usage here at Continuum West Newton.  This is a multi part story of my travels.

Intent

To develop a highly flexible system for real time acquisition, storage, and display of electricity usage statistics.

To share this technology with the world facilitating energy use awareness as well as collaboration.

To further promote the concept of a “Smart Grid,” and demonstrate its economic and environmental benefits.

Why Flexibility

The Smart Grid is still under development so we feel that upgradability and modularity are extremely important for such a volatile and fast paced field of innovation.

Leveraging ubiquitous wired/wireless communication infrastructure and protocols such as TCP/IP, 802.11 and Ethernet removes the need for unmanageable proprietary hardware resulting in long term upgradability and modularity.  

Why Real Time

Real time power monitoring has been proven to effectively reduce power consumption due to waste.  It is intuitive to consider that humans need some sort of feedback in order to recognize the presence of waste.  For example if one leaves the faucet open one has sound and sight feedback indicating there is waste.  What sort of feedback do we have for electricity?  None really, this is why these systems can help with waste reduction.

Personal or home use real time power monitoring has proven to be effective but this project is an experiment on efficacy within a commercial setting such as an office building.  It is difficult to quantify ones contribution to power consumption in an office setting.  As a result our analysis will focus on large scale behavior.  One such experiment I am curious to try is to have the entire company turn off their computer monitors for 5-10 minutes and see the change in the real time graph.

Why Transparency

As a dedicated member of the Designers Accord, this is yet another step Continuum has taken towards following our carbon footprint, monitoring our progress and sharing our results with the world.

Why Collaboration

Because the design is “open source” we hope that other energy conscious individuals/ organizations will be inspired to collaborate and contribute, resulting in an ever improving system.  For example due to the flexibility of the system architecture we can easily port our data to be fed into the Google PowerMeter. (That is when Google finally gets their act together and puts this thing online!)

http://www.google.org/powermeter/index.html

Tune in next week where I will discuss how I decided to monitor our electricity use.