So it’s the bank holiday weekend and I have spent a fair amount of time playing around with my currentcost meter attached to my laptop. The end result is a pretty graph like the one shown. I’ve added in some of my own appliance detection code to detect different energy events based on their characteristics. Hence the kettle on/off markers.
As with all new technologies it is sometimes difficult to spot the real value until you have played around with it for a bit. Having now spent the time building my currentcost graphing system I think I now realise that it might be missing the point slightly. It IS interesting (certainly from simply spreading awareness) to see our energy being spent but the real value is being able to spot the trends and answer questions on the information. There are certainly some interesting questions that we need to be able profile the data to answer.
Are there any appliances wasting serious amounts of energy in standby?
What percentage of the total bill does each appliance take up? Or where is the best place to start if I want to make a difference to my power bill?
So the next step is to try and generate a nice pie chart of a whole day (and then maybe a month) of energy use, by detecting what energy is being used by what appliance.