Bright Shiny Data

Well hello. What's that shiny thing on our bookshelf? It looks like a digital picture frame but it is so much more.

Our utility company offered us a slot in their pilot program to track the way we use energy. It's sort of a Nielsen rating of electricity usage. Plus it gives us immediate feedback and awareness to let us determine ways to be more energy efficient. Plus it is, in fact, a digital picture frame. And what new parents don't love to have an unending slideshow of cute baby pictures?

But actually, we're really loving this energy tracking. After a quick h]set up link to our smart meter, this thing was ready to go and providing us with updated energy usage every 3-5 seconds. We'd already been receiving monthly breakdowns of energy use for the last few months. We knew that we seemed to use most of our energy in the late evening after the baby was sleeping, but we never really knew why.

Here's an hourly breakdown for a day when one of us got home at about 1pm. You can see that our energy level went up at that time, with a spike at 4pm. Lights, heat, hot water, and the dishwasher were to blame.

But this is the real story of why our energy usage tends to go up at about 9pm. See if you can guess. Here's a pretty typical power usage snapshot, taken this afternoon - the little blips are heat and hot water usage, i.e. showers, dishes, etc. But that sustained blip at 9pm?

Here's our energy snapshot again, this time photographed at about 9:30 at night. Our energy use for this minute skyrocketed. What are we doing?

Laundry. And lots of it. Not quite every night, but close. Turns out that our dryer is by far the least efficient thing we have running in our house, per minute of run time (since we use the hot water heater more often, that one might actually cost more in the long run). Baby goes to bed, and we start laundry. And sometimes, it's a load that uses hot water! A double whammy. At least now we know why our electricity bill has gone up this year.

The immediate feedback is fun. Last night, we tried plugging and unplugging our Christmas lights to see what effect they had. We have a Kill-a-Watt monitor to check power usage of an individual device, but this gives a more complete picture. Of course, the digital frame itself is using energy, but only about $5 a year or less. Well worth the price! I can't wait to compare with summer when the AC is running full-blast!