currentcost

Posts Tagged ‘currentcost’

CurrentCost – the CC128

Monday, December 29th, 2008

The nice people at CurrentCost were kind enough to let me have a pre-production version of their next home electricity monitor to play with: the CC128.

I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about it for a few weeks now, but the run up to Christmas meant it got forgotten.

But I finally had a bit of time to give it a try today.

If you already know about CurrentCost meters, nothing here will surprise you – this is more of a refinement to the current design, rather than something new and different. (If you don’t, I’ve written about CurrentCost meters before – this new one is just the same, except with a new display unit).

There are some improvements here that I like.

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Tags:cc128, currentcost
Posted in tech | 71 Comments »

CurrentCost – setting yourself a personal goal

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

One of the themes that came up at HomeCamp was that collecting data about personal energy usage was good, but putting it in a broader context helped make it more effective.

With that in mind, I thought I’d make a small improvement to my CurrentCost app to add a financial context to the data it displays.

I’ve added the ability to specify an annual electricity usage target – it asks the question “How much do you want to spend on electricity in a year?”

screenshot Once you answer that, a target line is added to each graph. The target line shows how much electricity you should use in order to meet your goal.

For example, the graph showing daily electricity usage has a horizontal line showing how much electricity usage you can use a day in order to meet your target annual electricity spend. Bars in the graph that are taller than the horizontal line show you exceeding your goal, bars that stay under show you on track.

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Tags:currentcost, electricity, energy, environmental, homecamp, homecamp08
Posted in code, tech | 2 Comments »

HomeCamp

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

Yesterday was HomeCamp:

…an unconference about using technology to monitor and automate the home for greener resource use and to save costs. This is about low energy devices and servers, reducing your electricity bills, monitoring your mouse traps, home automation, monitoring your water usage, using solar power…

Fifty or so people came together at Imperial College to talk about how we can reduce our energy usage.

The format was different to other barcamps and unconferences I’ve been to – rather than separate rooms, most of the time was spent with everyone together in a single room. And the talks flowed on from each other – it felt more like a single day-long conversation than a series of separate presentations.

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Tags:barcamp, conservation, currentcost, electricity, energy, environment, environmental, home camp, homecamp, homecamp08, onzo, wattson
Posted in tech | 7 Comments »

Thinking about Home Camp

Monday, November 17th, 2008

This is a quick post to spread the word about Home Camp to anyone who follows my blog but doesn’t follow Chris Dalby (aka @yellowpark).

I’ve posted a lot about CurrentCost since I got the meter back in May, but in the past few months it seems like lots of people are giving it a try – I’m seeing more tweets and blog posts about the potential of CurrentCost, and I’m getting more and more emails about my Python CurrentCost app.

So I’m really looking forward to Home Camp – Chris’ idea for a CurrentCost-themed unconference, and a chance to discuss and try ideas relating to monitoring our energy use.

Although it’s CurrentCost-inspired, it wont be limited to CurrentCost or even only electricity monitoring. For example, I’ve prepared a short presentation on monitoring home gas usage in a CurrentCost-type way, which I hope will get some ideas going. And I’ve started thinking about how we could monitor personal car petrol usage – probably my most expensive energy bill!

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Tags:barcamp, currentcost, energy, environment, hackday, home camp, homecamp, unconference
Posted in tech | 2 Comments »

Use CurrentCost to see how your electricity usage compares with others

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

I’ve played with ways that CurrentCost users could compare their usage with their friends for a while.

But now I want to see how it will cope with a bigger group of users.

Want to join in? I’ve started writing some instructions – please do give it a try!

Find out how here.

Update: I figure that if I’m asking for people to help me, then it’s only fair that I give something back. So I’ve made available the Python source that reads and parses CurrentCost updates.

Tags:currentcost
Posted in tech | 1 Comment »