Brian Irwin || Windermere Real Estate Co. ||

I stumbled across two  tools to help you analyze your home’s energy consumption!  One is Microsoft’s Hohm project, and the other being Google’s Powermeter project.   Tonight I started with the Hohm project.  Colorful homepage, simple looking interface, and all you need is a Windows Live  ID or a Hotmail address.  All free info, which I appreciate.   At first I was thinking that Microsoft is getting the user interface design down.  Wrong!   : )   Actually it’s not that bad, but I was a bit perplexed when you drill down into the “advanced home profile”.   The basic profile makes a lot assumptions for you, but the advanced side………..well it get’s advanced in true microsoft fashion.  Almost obtuse for the general homeowner.  Perhaps just good to avoid.   Back to the basics — one nice thing Microsoft’s Hohm project has accomplished is to connect with partner utilties like Seattle City Light.   An upcoming connection to Puget Sound Energy should be arriving soon (which means for now you are left to manually input data).    I did not see anything in the related article regarding timelines for the PSE connection.   Bottom line —-  after fiddling with the site for awhile it aggregated my city light data, compiled the manually input pse data, offered some basic graphs on energy consumption, compared against larger demographic stats, and offered suggestions on energy savings.  Not really the most mind blowing, but if you haven’t really looked at your energy consumption it is a good place to start.  One thing I appreciated about the recommendation section was that they showed you the DIY costs vs Contracted Costs and the projected energy savings for the year.  Helpful data indeed.

Personally I am hoping the Google Powermeter project hooks up with Seattle Utilities in the near future.  At the moment there is no partnerships with local utilities in the works.  You would have to use a device such as the TED 5000 to record and analyze data.   It is a powerful device, but if you are looking for simple analysis, a $200 device might not be in the cards.

So perhaps Hohm is the place to start, then if you like what you see powermeter could be the next step.   That’s it for me.  Let me know if you try either out, and how you liked it!