Seattle Thinktank

Archive for the ‘environmental’ Category

Infrared Cameras and the Green Movement

I believe that behind major social changes are simple, subtle technological changes that give us the tools to alter our world. For the green movement, I believe that the price of infrared cameras will be one of these factors. Let me explain…

I attended the Seattle Green Festival last weekend. http://www.greenfestivals.org/ It was interesting, and for the most part what I had expected. I think the general air of wanting to change things for the better is what most draws me to events like these. One booth did get me thinking about how one small technological change could have great leverage for actually effecting change. That wasn’t their intention. They wanted me to pay for their service where they visit your house and tell you how you can stop heat loss making your house more efficient. What was interesting about these guys was that they use a 30k infrared camera to figure this out.

Using this camera they could see .5 degree changes through your walls. They could see water seepage problems. They could see where our insulation ended. For 10k you could buy a camera that could see 2 degree differences. This isn’t as much detail but, it was getting a similar result. After they inspected your house, then you knew where all the problems are and how much it is going to cost to fix them.

So this got me thinking. At what price point will these cameras have to be, before home inspectors use them to review a house on the market? As home buyers get pickier about the cost to heat a home, the demand for better reviews will go up. At some point you will start seeing home inspectors reviewing, not just the construction of a home, but using an infrared camera to look into the home and tell you how much insulation it has. I know I would have paid an extra $100 dollars for this service from my home inspector. If a home inspector did this 100 times a year then after 1 year they could pay off a 10k camera. Now if I would have known which houses were better insulated it would have influenced how I purchase a home. And if that is true about me than I bet a lot of people would pay more for a house that is cheaper to heat. The end result is that sellers would probably spend some extra money to insulate a home before it goes on the market if they knew they would be accountable to seller for how the home is insulated.

So watch the price of infrared cameras. When it dips low enough, you might notice house inspectors armed with these altering the topology of the home buying landscape. As the inspectors hold all of us accountable for how much heat we waste, the world will get greener.

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Posted by admin to Infrared, environmental, green on March 31, 2009 at 8:22 am

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.