Posts Tagged ‘home camp’

Responding to the state of the National Grid

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Okay, I know I said I’d stop banging on about CurrentCost stuff… sorry. My next post will be about something different. Honest! 😉

But with talk about Home Camp 2009 starting to pick up, it seems like a good time to remember one of the interesting factoids I picked up at Home Camp last year.

As I wrote at the time:

…the frequency of the electricity you receive from the National Grid is proportional to the ratio of supply vs demand for electricity usage on a national level…

There was a lot of discussion about how this information could be used to make a difference.

This is discussed in more depth at dynamicdemand, but the sort of thing we talked about was how you could make a significant difference without reducing your total electricity usage at all, but by shifting your usage to times when national supply is greater than the demand, and so when the energy is cheaper and more efficient to produce.

As I wrote at the time, it might be interesting to see what this looks like plotted against your own personal electricity usage.

Demonstrating my lightning quick l33t development skills, only ten weeks later, I got round to trying it out. 🙂

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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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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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