Hack your home

[Paqman]

My big project this winter is trying to improve the energy efficiency of my home. Saving money, increasing comfort, and reducing my family's carbon footprint gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I thought I'd share a really good tool for tracking and visualising energy use and savings:

iMeasure (http://www.imeasure.org.uk)

The main reason I like this site is that it plots your energy use against weather data (specifically degree days) so that you can get a real picture of your energy efficiency. I believe it's UK only, sorry. Anybody interested in setting up a "community" to compare and share?

I'm also interested in the Open Energy Monitor (http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/) project. I've got an off-the-shelf electricity monitor, but I like the idea of using an Arduino to actively control energy use, rather than just monitoring.

[Paqman]

Here's an example of some of the data you can get out of Imeasure. The red dots are actual energy use against degree days, with the slope of the regression line being a measure of the actual energy efficiency of your system. Also available are graphs of predicted versus actual use which be used to assess the responsiveness of your controls.

The best bit is when a change that you've made shows up in the data!

[eriktheblu]

Slightly OT, but does anyone else think the metric of "kilowatt-hours" is absolutely absurd? It's like measuring distance in meters-per-second-hours.

[Lucradia]

My energy provider provides a calculator like that, and allows me to compare my current year to previous years, and more.

For free, as long as I am a customer of theirs.

[Paqman]

Slightly OT, but does anyone else think the metric of "kilowatt-hours" is absolutely absurd? It's like measuring distance in meters-per-second-hours.

I get what you're saying, but it's a handy unit to bill people in. If you sent them a bill for however many GJ of electricity their eyes would glaze over completely.

It does bug me when I see things quoted with figures like "Will save you 100kW of electricity a year". That doesn't even make any sense.