House Tweets to Monitor Energy Consumption

Lynne Kiesling

I have been playing around with Twitter for the past few weeks, and it sure is intriguing. Most of my Twitter stream is BBC news updates and playlist updates for a couple of online radio sites that I frequent, but the one about which I’m most excited is andy_house, which is the Twitter stream of IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark and his home automation system.

As described in Earth2Tech post, Andy has set up a home automation system with digital monitoring and reporting of energy use data, and one of its outputs is Twitter “tweets”.

It won’t surprise any of you regular KP readers that (a) I love this and (b) this idea is not that wacky or out there:

It’s not as weird as it sounds. The Twitter stream is an exercise in using the data from home automation feeds, and the hope is that, by making energy usage data transparent and easy to digest, it will change consumer behavior and reduce energy consumption. The former Flash guys at GreenBox are working on using the same type of info for their energy management software, as are startups Agilewaves, and Lucid Design Group.

You’ll remember that I discussed Greenbox in my recent post on how devices fare on my “transactive test”.

UPDATE: I forgot to recommend this EpicFu interview with Andy, which is great.