I have been lucky enough to have had a prototype of the home version of energyhive for a number of months.
What is it? Let’s start at the beginning. I have one of the standard energy monitoring meters that electricity companies give away. These are also known as a real-time display (RTD). There is a clamp on the wires from the mains supply to my electricity meter and this sends readings of my electricity usage continuously to my energy monitoring meter which is on a shelf in my office over the ‘air waves’
I can easily see the amount of electricity that I am using and it gives me also a rough estimate of the cost. The real downside is that I have no easy way of finding out about usage when I am out, in bed or simply not watching the monitor.
That’s where energyhive comes in.
The monitor is connected to a small Linux appliance that takes its readings and sends them over the Internet every few seconds to the energyhive‘s database. The Linux appliance looks like a baby Internet router and just ticks away with nothing needed from me.
It gets its software updates automatically and was installed by simply just plugging it setting up my account up on the web – remember this was one of the first prototypes so the guys made it simple even then.
energyhive has a confidential online repository that holds how much electricity I have used second by second ever since the appliance was ‘plugged’ in.
Why is this important? Like most consumers I had no idea just how much electricity each device in my house used except by hearsay. For example we all should know by now not to leave TVs on standby overnight.
I access the energyhive database via a simple web interface and can see the peaks and troughs of my usage over any period of time. I can also see the average usage of everyone else whose data is being collected so I immediately have some feedback if my usage was greater than the norm.
As more and more consumers join energyhive then I will be able to compare myself to the average of similar sized households for an even better feedback on ‘how I am doing’.
energyhive are continuing to investigate different ways of giving this feedback to make it easier for consumers to decide what they have to do to save money on their bills.
What it has done for me so far? At first I did play some games. For example, I would ring up when I was travelling to check if the water being boiled was for me – as it is easy to see when a kettle is being boiled because of the large spike in usage that it creates.
But at a more practical level I soon realised that if I didn’t fill the kettle so much, then my ‘hourly’ cups of tea would use much less electricity.
I did notice strange spikes at night in usage and eventually tracked them down to our refrigerator. We replaced it sooner rather than later and now our average usage has fallen. (BTW later versions may allow monitoring of individual appliances as part of the study in making understanding easier for consumers in general).
Recently I noticed that the usage overnight had climbed over my average and I tracked it down to the central heating pump running continuously as a valve had stuck.
All of the little adjustments that we have started to make to our usage are now starting to make real savings in our costs and our carbon footprint.
What about the energyhive database itself? The data all sits on servers that are secure and protected in the same ways as servers for financial services would be.
energyhive uses a version of IBM’s Informix that in tests has demonstrated that it can accept data from millions of homes many times a minute and yet be able still to generate the graphs that I would use as a consumer. energyhive’s backroom technology has been the subject of much press interest – see this IBM press release as an example. The tests demonstrated that up to 3 million homes could be connected all using commodity servers in the data centre – just the software is special !
This gives me the same instant feedback on usage, a history of my usage and a comparison against the average of everyone else. I can set the costs of my electricity here rather than on the web and usefully can add a note when I see spikes to note which device caused the spike.
An unintended use of the technology was during a recent power cut we left the house and went out for lunch. I was able to monitor usage of electricity at the house and knew immediately when power was regained as the Linux appliance re-booted and started streaming information as soon as power was restored.
And the future: I will blog later as energyhive progresses from testing to production and note all the uses that I have found for this pretty unique way of tracking electricity usage and just as important what my carbon footprint is.
See energyhive for a look at the main website
