

Wattvision's (YC W09) down and dirty energy management dreams - savrajsingh
http://earth2tech.com/2009/04/26/wattvisions-down-and-dirty-energy-management-dreams

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savrajsingh
If anyone wants to be on the private 'alpha' send a mail to info [at]
wattvision.com with a digital photo of your electricity meter. Also, one minor
factual issue (already pinged Katie) Wattvision is not a year and a half old.
The company received YC funding in Jan '09. ;)

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whatusername
US Only I assume? Or are you eyeing off the rest of the world this quickly?

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savrajsingh
There's no reason we can't support non-US users. :)

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jonasvp
Funny, a while ago I rolled out my own version of this, even dirtier than the
Wattvision solution. My users would go to the website, put in the digits
displayed on their meter, and get a nice chart showing their consumption.

Accuracy obviously depends on how often you enter your meter count but it was
fine for shared flats that needed to split their electricity bill and sublets.

We're using it for our shared flat and I still think it would be a good
holdover until dynamic meters are rolled out everywhere. I even thought up a
fitting domain name and put the app online. Before I even got any users,
though, some marketing company got wind of it and offered me a load of money
for the domain name - so I sold it.

I'll put it back online once I think of a new name but it's low priority. I'm
not sure how many people would actually bother with putting in their data.

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Tichy
I recently realized that it might be possible to just point a webcam at the
meter and somehow read the digits off that (I'd really like to have a way to
log that electronically).

The trend in Germany seems to be for power providers to offer the data via
web, though. They are not there yet, but test programs are already being
rolled out (some transmitting the data via the power line, others using DSL).

Even just having online access to the overall consumption would be so nice. It
would then probably be easy to create twittering washing machines and coffee
makers on top of that...

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maryrosecook
DanW did a project where his house's energy consumption is automatically
tweeted. Raw data is gathered by a very cheap device that clips onto the main
power inlet to the house.

<http://appril.org/post/93599990/the-tweeting-house>

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Tichy
Very interesting, thanks!

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gruseom
Nice hit!

This is pretty funny:

 _Wattvision also hopes to add in smart social networking features (Singh
previously worked at Microsoft)_

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FraaJad
Large buildings(the ones who spend large amounts of money on HVAC related
energy consumption) are already putting up a shadow electricity meter which
counts the pulses. The data is then read using a LonWorks(wired)/Zigbee
(wireless) meters which have web/SOAP interface.

If Wattvision can come up with sub $100 equipment, then this will get
interesting.

