Seattle Thinktank

Archive for February, 2009

Current State of Power Monitoring…

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Lord Kelvin

5 years ago I lived with a friend who had just bought a house. I moved in as his roommate. We split the bills evenly and after a couple electrical bills it was feeling rather expensive to live there. I discovered I was paying 300% more in electricity than before. So we started trying to figure out why his house used so much power. My friend did this by unplugging things, then running out to his power meter to time the little wheel that went around. We discovered that it wasn’t the hot tub, but the server rack in the basement that was costing to much.

I couldn’t help but to think that the way we went about that process was pedestrian and very manual. We wanted to monitor our electricity consumption but, there must be a better way. I thought up an idea of a power strip that you would put in your cost per KWH and it would tell you the cost of everything plugged in. Soon afterwords I found the Kill-a-watt. It was sufficient but, it didn’t tell me my cost. I had to calculate that.

So several years went by and this idea kept coming up. “There must be some way to monitor all the electricity I’m using so I can pinpoint what is wasting power in my house.” For any other type of resource; natural gas, water, you know immediately when you have a leak, but with electricity it just wasn’t easy to tell. So we though of a system that would use the zigbee board to transmit power information to a website so that anyone could track their power consumption.

And apparently, so did everyone else…

The Kill-A-Watt

The Kill-A-Watt : This is the device that made the scene years ago. If you are just interested in how much power your appliances are using, then this is a great place to start. For $18 dollars you can start to monitor some simple devices in your house. This is easily a 5 year old invention but, it gives us a good starting place for what innovations came next.

Home Projects

Many people have made their own power monitoring systems. But, this fellow’s solution was my favorite. Not only does he do a great job of building it into his panel. But, he creates his own software to built off of it. I think my favorite part is that he can monitor each circuit independently. This is something I cannot find in any of the commercial models.

A better Kill-A-Watt

MiCasaVerde : This company sports a clever little setup where you plug there special Vera appliance into your house. It transmits all of its information over your wifi. You can get light switches as well. The coolest thing about Vera is that they have an open API to let 3rd party developers join in.

AlertMe : This gadget is like a networked version of the kill-a-watts. You put in special plugs. The plugs send data about the energy consumption of what is hooked to them. And the result ends up on the web where you can view it. It looks like a nice design, the downsides are that it still will only monitor the devices hooked to its special plugs. So if you have a bunch of things, it is going to take a bunch of expensive plugs. One really interesting feature is that it can kill devices remotely to keep them from using power.

Going to the source

The Energy Detective (TED) : For about $140 you can install a device with current clips onto your power box. It comes with a little module that lets you see your real time usage. The device also logs the data internally and if you buy there $45 dollar software you can plug it into your computer and view the data with their software. You can also export the data and view it with excel. Here is a screen shot. Now if you want to show the how green you are you can join the current watchers and tell the world how much power your saving.

Blueline Innovations For $119 you can buy this power cost monitor. The way it hooks to your system is a little, well, backwards. You have to install a device on the glass enclosure of your power meter. It watches the little wheel as it spins around and transmits the data back to a hand held device. The advantage of this is that the installation is very easy. The downside, I have heard, is that if your box is exposed to direct sunlight it will have trouble reading the little wheel. So it works best if your meter is on the north side of your house. I still think its a little clunky but, for the most part it gives you the full power usage of your house.

Brutech : This company sells a monitor that connects into your house power and they will track and display what is going on. The downside is they only track the power coming into the house, so you don’t get to see what is going on in each circuit. Also the dashboard is a little dated. Not that I don’t like the tachometer look.

The power of software analysis

Greenbox : This solution offers much better graphs, and advice. You can see how much energy you are using, and how to change around your enegy consumption to lower your cost. For instance, electricity is more expensive at some times than others.

Google Power meter : You know this is going to get interesting when Google gets into the mix. These guys are building a software platform that will do the analysis and give you a variety of ways to view the results. It will require a smart meter to be in place but, once that data is collected, now you get to really see whats going on. They know what your outdoor lights use, they know your fridge power usage. Just by looking at your graph the can tell you what you are using and how to improve that. Here is the down side. Its in prototype mode and I have no idea when this will be ready. But, if they have this built then most of these other solutions quickly will become obsolete.

The Market

To get started understanding the market, check out this article. Outside of explaining the market, it also explains some of the protocols that some of these home power solutions use. Protocols like ZigBee; Z-Wave from Zensys; and Echelon’s LonWorks.

In Conclusion:

I’m pretty excited about TED. Its on the market now. Its fairly cheap and it seems to have a decent following. I also think they would be a great candidate for collecting data for Google’s software analysis. So when we swap out our electrical box this year, I think I will be installing one of these.

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Posted by paulin to environmental, green, power meter on February 22, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Tags: environmental, power monitoring

Big Slice, Small Slice rules

About 4 years ago I took a shot at building a music startup with several friends of mine. We were a group of 10 builders who just wanted to build things and we weren’t really thinking about how to organize ourselves well. I think this is common really when it comes to people who get jazzed by creating new things but, don’t really think about how the success of the project will be divided up between them. It somewhat reminds me of a poker game when you don’t play with real cash. People just play and think differently. “Why not go all in?” “Why not give this guy 50% and that guy 30%?” It all is somewhat meaningless when you start with zero. Sure you can have everyone pitch in some money. Maybe then it makes it feel more real?

Now some people seem to have a sense of value from the beginning. If for some reason you can get two of them on your team at the same time then you will notice that they will come up with a system and take it all very seriously. Perhaps you file it as a corporation and hand out shares. Perhaps you have a percentage based on how much you contribute. You can arrange this any way you want but, what you end up with is a group of people trying to bootstrap them selves into a business starting with nothing.

Now this fascinates me. What is an effective way for people to arrange themselves before money is involved? You end up in a weird quagmire where no one really wants to talk about money and ownership. You want to talk about what you are building. At the same time this is one of the most important aspects of business. If you don’t handle this situation early then as soon as money is involved everyone will be forced into this situation. And I guarantee that this is when all of the assumptions, handshakes, and verbal agreements are forced out in the open. All this miscommunication of what is owned by who and how everyone is going to be paid is suddenly a big focus. This is when drama begins….

So for years now I have been mulling around an idea for building a simple set of rules that any group of people could adopt and start working from. This wouldn’t be legally binding, that could happen later. But, it is an way to get your friends together, build something, and not worry so much about creating a corporation and handing out shares. That can be done later after your team has decided if the idea they are working on is even worth the sweat they have put into it. What I’m thinking of is more like board game rules. You pull them out of the box, everyone reads them together, complains that they are too hard, and then slowly your group starts forward. After everyone knows the rules they just go about doing what they are doing.

This is what we came up with. Big Slice Small Slice Rules

It comes down to treating your group as if it is a consulting firm and everyone has an hourly rate. You can adjust people rates depending on tasks, or skills they bring. It also has this idea of budgeting. Instead of this vague notion of printing your own money (stock), just budget some portion of the company to satisfy creating some portion of the project. For example to finish phase 1 you budget 10%. What is so great about this is that it is low overhead to get rolling with, it sets the teams expectations, you can add and remove people easily, and the ownership adjust proportionately to what people contribute. As a bonus when it finally comes time for money everyone knows roughly what they have contributed so at least, you have some idea of where to begin with pricing things out.

Now going back to our original startup. We fortunately never had any money involved. We had somehow organized ourselves into 3 LLC’s with a variety of ownership and it was rather complex. I think it could have been a mess but, in the end it ended up being a good learning experience for all of us. At one point one of the guys remarked that “A small slice of a big pie is just as good as a large slice of a small pie”. It was a good point and where the Big Slice Small Slice rules (BS3 rules) got their name.