Reading this you’re probably consuming electricity. Your computer, the lights, heating or air conditioning. If you’re in your offices there are probably one or two things plugged in that you’re not using at the moment. At home it’s probably even worse… and when the only real visibility you have is your monthly bill it’s pretty tough to actually do anything about it.

Luckily there are a number of solutions starting to ramp up that will help the typical homeowner to get a better understanding of what’s happening in their house in real time – both as an all-up number but with the more sophisticated solutions on a device by device basis.

Once you have the ability to monitor then you can start to make intelligent decisions – and see the impact of those decisions by tracking changes in real data.

At the macro level solutions like Microsoft Hohm and Google Powermeter can obtain billing data directly from your utility company and give you an overview of what’s happening to a bill by bill basis.  Hohm also has a number of wizards to let you provide more information about your dwelling and it then makes recommendations.

Earth Aid goes one step further by using the same data (already connected to more utilities than either Microsoft or Google) as well as performing analysis on local areas to indicate how well you’re doing compared to your neighbors. They identify appropriate offers and tax incentives that you can take advantage of and also let you earn points that you can trade for rewards.

If you want more realtime information Wattvision and the TED 5000 connect to your power meter and provide real time data. The TED product even uploads that data to the Google Powermeter site to give you a more granular dashboard.

Tracking down performance of individual items is a little harder at the moment. Most TVs and refrigerators don’t have a way to report energy usage but you can plug them in via an individual Kill-a-watt plug or power-strip and gather that data to help you understand what your microwave or DVD player are actually costing you in “standby” mode. 

It’s interesting to see devices like the Intel Intelligent Home Energy Management platform appearing – by using sensors embedded in devices around the home it can track and monitor everything from the external temperature to the power that your phone charger is drawing and help you make decisions based on the information in real time.

Imagine being able to optimize your use of the electricity grid based on the cost – automatically start your dishwasher at 3am so the dishes are ready for breakfast; monitor the temperature in rooms and make a decision based on occupancy patterns as to when to start warming them; flag an in-efficient household appliance as maybe being in need of replacement.

For now however you can start small and simple with solutions like the Conserve to control things at the click of a switch.

After my last little experiment creating the stop motion weather watch I wanted to put one together to cover the whole of "Snowpocalypse 2008" as the White Christmas here in Seattle has been tagged.

I used the same tools as before... the webcam had been happily snapping away once a minute and storing the images on the Windows Home Server so I had the source material, but the biggest challenge was to get the 15,000 images displayed quickly enough to be interesting but not so jerky as to be un-watchable. I won't say 8 years working with some very smart TV production teams has actually rubbed off but after some fiddling around the idea of 10 days in 100 seconds seemed to work, so here for your pleasure:

To generate this I took images 5 minutes apart and created an uncompressed 30FPS AVI. The resulting AVI was almost 4GB which obviously isn't practical for streaming on the web (and bigger than the 105MB per file limit for free accounts on Live Streaming!) so I turned to another tool - Windows Media Encoder - to convert the file to a WMV at DVD quality which took me down to 25MB (quite a difference, but remember the AVI was uncompressed and the WMV was a two pass, variable bit-rate encode so heavily optimized).

As it turned out I ended up 4 seconds short of the full 100, but please permit me some artistic license (I should had added a credit roll!)

All this messing about looking at the weather has got me wondering more about what patterns are really like here in the Pacific Northwest so as well as becoming a regular reader of Cliff Mass' musings on the weather Rhiannon and I have ordered our own weatherstation to put in the garden (and started sharing images at Weather Underground as well as the Webcam page here in advance of the hardware arriving!)

20 years ago when I started working a snow day would have meant the world grinds to a halt.

Today thanks to the wonders of the electronic office I still have access to most of the corporate resources I need to be productive and I don't have to leave home... which is a good thing given the weather!

Thanks to the weather over the last few days a bunch of meetings got canceled I had a chance to catch up on some reading and play with some things...

It's times like this that remind me just what the reach of the Microsoft eco-system is. I'm not talking about the fact I can work from home but the range of tools and technologies that enable pretty much anything you want.

The video above was created in the following way

• I have a Microsoft VX7000 Webcam connected to my Windows Home Server.
• I'm running Fwink webcam software that takes a photo every minute.
• I rename and archive the images using Limagito
• I used PhotoLapse to convert 400 or so images to a video file.
• I uploaded the video to the Live Streaming Service and that gives me the Silverlight player above.

Apart from the webcam and the Home Server everything is free software. It might not be the most elegant solution but I found all the bits and got it up and running (thanks to Live Search) in about half an hour.

I think folks too often just see Microsoft as a big monolith (even some people who work there!) but it's moments like this, and sites like Microspotting and View<myWorld> and of course some of the more pragmatic 'softees that remind us there's a lot more hidden away both internally and from folks building cool stuff in the community.

A while ago I volunteered for a couple of days at the World Vision AIDS Experience. It's an eye opening look at how poverty and disease are threatening the future of the developing world, and how we can make a difference.

World Vision are not alone in seeing the problem, but it's interesting how many of the solutions revolve around the role of women in that environment.

With World AIDS day and Thanksgiving fast approaching, stop for a moment and consider the girl effect. What can you do to help fix the problem?

(okay, so the headline was a stretch but I’ve not used alliteration on a regular basis since Big Brother so cut me some slack!)

So, it’s been a fun couple of weeks with the Mustang. Apart from the weather not really being ideal for the open top lifestyle there is something nice about rugging up warm and having the wind in your hair (must be something about living in QLD and moving to the PNW that makes the Mustang attractive!)

Mats (and Wheel bling!)

The first little things the ‘stang is now sporting are new mats (gotta try and keep the dog hair under control) and Pony logos on the wheels (to match the dust cap covers).

Both the mats and the center caps came from a great eBay seller Bullitt03722 – it’s great to find someone who’s selling because they understand the emotion behind personalizing your ride (was the only place I could find the right color mats, and one of the only places that list a price for the center caps as a 4 pack rather than make you order individually). If you’re in the market for Mustang parts give him a go.

MPG (and more)

I knew when I got it that the ‘stang didn’t have the usual collection to gauges and computers that modern car owners have come to expect. Even the Jeep tells me the miles per gallon and has a bunch of other gauges I don’t ever look at… but with the current economic environment and gas prices it’s certainly been more topical.

Something I didn’t know is that pretty much every car since 1996 in North America (and Europe and Australia) has a connector for On Board Diagnostics (ODB-II)… while the usual use for this is to let a mechanic find out what’s wrong when the “check” light comes on it also provides a whole lot of real-time data about that’s going on in the car – from oil pressure to water temperature, selected gear and accelerator position, speed and quantity of fuel consumed.

There are a bunch of options including the very sophisticated DashDaq and Trinity (which allows you to tune your engine parameters) but I went for a simple but flexible ScanGaugeII which has a great set of features out of the box and also allows you to select vehicle specific gauges to display as well (the Mustang, for instance, reports Fuel Tank Level via ODB-II. Sadly I can’t find pressures from the Tire Pressure Monitoring System – that would be very neat).

As expected I’ve discovered that top down motoring costs a little more in fuel (though windows up and top down is better) – it’s not been very scientific but it’s shown me some things that have worked…

MAFS (and zMax)

In the quest to try and improve MPG and low end pickup and general smoothness (it’s a V6 not the more muscle-bound 4.6 V8 GT after all) a couple of folks suggested I replace the Mass Air Flow Sensor with an aftermarket option… and as the job was well within my mechanical capabilities (two screws, 10 minutes including time to read the instructions!) I thought I’d give it a go. While it’s probably going to take a long time to pay for itself in gas savings it does seem to have had a difference around the 1-2mpg mark and it’s certainly happier at low revs on these cold mornings.

Because I didn’t know how the car had been treated before I got it I’ve added zMax to both oil and fuel to give it a clean out and smooth over. The results in both the Jeep and the Pony have been noticable – they’re both quieter and feel smoother accelerating. We’ll see over the next couple of weeks as we watch MPG in both cars if it actually makes a difference.

and that leads me to Environmental iMpact

Over the years I’ve been concerned about the carbon footprint of some of the cars I’ve driven so have tried to find ways to offset where I can’t reduce. I try to reduce by taking public transport or telecommuting as often as I can, but here in the US we now subscribe to TerraPass to offset both cars and some of our household emissions. TerraPass offer both carbon balancing credit schemes but also have an online retail store where you can purchase cool power saving, monitoring and generating gadgets (including the ScanGauge)

In Australia we subscribed to Greenfleet and in the UK CarbonZero. We are also saving for a tree in the Carbon Grove thanks to the Internet Explorer team :)

I’ve got some more things planned in the next couple of weeks (not least working out how to fix the ScanGauge to the dash in a more user friendly way!)

WinXP had some power schemes, and Vista improved on the power management options for desktops and laptops. But they were all pretty geeky, you had to know what was going on and to do a good job of getting it set up right there are a bunch of places you needed to go to install things.

Steve Clayton has just reminding me that Microsoft, Climate Savers Computing Initiative and Verdiem have made available Edison as a free download.

Edison (an application we’ve been testing at home for the last 90 days) is a free installation to help you optimize power usage on your PC as we all strive for a greener computing experience.

Download it and give it a try – every little big helps :)

My tree at Carbon Grove

Thanks to the folks on the Internet Explorer team I planted a Virtual tree. I’ve made some commitments to help improve the environment (for instance I don’t drive to work any more, I take the bus or ride my bike) and if I visit my tree over the next six weeks then the IE folks in conjunction with Carbon Grove will plant a real tree.

As well as supporting the environment the site takes advantages of not only some of the new IE8 features (though it will work just as well in older browsers) but the folks at Jackson Fish Market have done a really creative job in bringing the forests to life.

This is just one of many ways you can get involved in making the world a bit better – recycling, composting, reducing your power bill … it doesn’t have to be hard (just remembering to turn out your office light or shut off your PC when you’re not using it) and over a year it adds up.

We live in a push-button, instant-on age. We leave devices in standby mode because we believe it’s helping save the planet… but is it really?

How much does your flat screen TV or l33t gaming rig consume when it’s “sleeping” and all you see is the little winking light telling you that you’re doing good.

And then all those wall warts. The chargers for your phone, your music player, the DS Lite. What are they draining long after the device is fully charged and idle?

I don’t know either – I’m lazy! But I do wish there was an easy way to shut things right down when I’m not using them, that was easy and wouldn’t inconvenience the family.

It looks like Belkin may have an answer to at least one of these problems about to hit the market. A powerstrip that you can turn on and off with a remote control!

It has two sockets that are always on (ideal for, say, the cable box and modem) and then 6 sockets which can be toggled with a remote control that you can put somewhere convenient.

For our house it means that for the $50 expected retail price we can easily power down the TV, the amplifier and speakers, the XBox360 and SqueezeBox music player without having to struggle and reach to find the wall switch.

Also from Belkin is a neat 3 way power strip than includes two USB chargers – that can eliminate a couple of the wall warts… really handy both at home and when you’re traveling (I often end up unplugging the alarm clock or kettle in a hotel room just to feed all my devices over night!)

While neither of these are a perfect solution – the remote control power strip probably still consumes some power when it’s idle (hopefully in the 2-5W not 25-45W range some surge protectors apparently consume) and the USB charge capabilities of the wall adapter which great I wonder if the transformer (and I hope it’s only one) shuts down when there’s nothing plugged into the sockets to need power…

I guess you could go a long way with some of the home automation solutions to managing this (and all with a universal remote control) but it would be nice to see a more common, consistent approach across all the equipment you find in home and office to really make an effort to stop sucking juice when it’s not needed. Your power bill will thank you now, and your kids will thank you when they don’t have to worry about the consequences!