Over on Yahoo, Graham Winfrey picked the Tweet-a-watt as Yahoo’s #2 of 10 “dumbest green gadgets“.

The Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each  plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

You can see the hundreds of (dumb?) kids, adults and hobbyists on Twitter who use the Tweet-a-watt on a daily basis to monitor: power, temperature, water levels, server stats and more. All using the open source power monitoring system we released earlier this year.

Interesting strategy Yahoo, while Google is working with some companies to release power monitoring hardware, APIs and software to monitor / reduce power (Google Power Meter) Yahoo and Business Insider are making top 10 lists about how dumb it is.

Google’s Household Energy Monitor Arrives in UK…

Google’s Energy Monitor allows householders to monitor energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, thereby reducing consumption and saving money. Google may be best known for helping you find things on the web, but the online search company’s latest move is a bid to make futuristic low-energy eco-homes a reality. Launching for the first time in the UK today, Google Powermeter is an online tool that allows householders to monitor their home’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions via the web, and so reduce their consumption and save money.

Enthusiasts have previously developed kits using open-source code that allow homes to post their energy usage to Twitter, and several companies sell energy monitors – such as the OWL and Wattson – which show real-time electricity consumption on wireless handheld displays. One such gadget available in the US, the TED 5000, already works with Powermeter.

Some history – The open source Tweet-a-watt project was announced and released before the Google Powermeter, after the release we applied to Google’s program so the Tweet-a-watt could work with the Google Powermeter API, we received a generic form-letter response, and then later a Google engineer commented on our site…

Hi,I’m an engineer on the Google PowerMeter team. I think Tweet-a-Watt is a really cool project! We’re excited by all the interest around Tweet-a-Watt and other do-it-yourself energy-monitoring projects, and we’d love to have all kinds of devices working with Google PowerMeter. Please stay tuned. Comment by Ka-Ping Yee — April 28, 2009 @ 4:45 am

That was about 6 months ago. We’ve sent additional requests through the Google powered device form, but they’ve been ignored. There are thousands of people out there using the fully open source energy monitoring system based on the software (and hardware) of the Tweet-a-watt, which also uses Google’s app engine, it’s not clear why Google isn’t working with any of them or opening up their API so other power meters can use it.

Lastly, another Power meter maker wrote in a few months ago.

It’s almost 2 month later and our situation is like yours in April 2009. We are metering device manufacturer, we applied to the program and did not get any response from Google, not even stay tuned. The powermeter API seems to be something virtual. Comment by Robert — June 18, 2009 @ 5:27 pm

Hopefully things will change.

“Energy use information drives meaningful behavior change” – we agree! Google announced today that they have their first device partner (TED) that can publish your power usage to Google’s PowerMeter.

We made our Tweet-a-watt completely open, thousands of folks are using them (you can see many on Twitter and in many Google app engine examples)…

We also sent Google a request using their form for “device partners” but we only got an auto-reply back.

Eventually we posted about this on our site and a Google engineer commented.

In early 2009, a month after we released the Tweet-a-watt, Google announced their “PowerMeter” and now almost a year later they have their first device partner, we’re a little bummed that Google *could have* had thousands of Tweet-a-watt customers using the Google PowerMeter all this time but for whatever reason will not?

Mains AC: non-invasive measuring @ OpenEnergyMonitor…

This method of measuring mains AC electrical energy use is quite nice, it doesn’t require any breaking of the mains wire, which makes it much safer, you just clip-on to the wire a sensor called a current transformer (CT) that measures the current flowing through either the live or neutral mains wire. It does this by measuring the magnetic field that surrounds the wire, created by the current. The simplicity of just clipping on the sensor means that it can be used to measure the electrical energy used by the whole house. It is the method used by many commercial devices that you can buy.

I don’t have much knowledge of how the commercial devices work apart from the use of the CT sensor, I couldn’t find much information on them and so the following is what I have managed to get to work in quite an experimental way. The results seem promising and useful, there are probably better more accurate ways of doing it and so hopefully it will improve over time but this is how far I have got so far.

Read more on the project page!

Tweet-a-watt makes it to Popular Science, August issue, page 64 – Kit of the month!

A German power company is having their power meters Twitter, what a great idea

Translated version….

Unusual distribution Offensive: The supplier EnBW wants its future electricity can twitter. Kunden sollen so genau über den eigenen Verbrauch informiert werden – und damit Energie sparen. Customers should be as accurate about their own consumption to be informed – and thus save energy. Hamburg – Das Unternehmen Yello Strom, eine hundertprozentige Tochter des Energiekonzerns EnBW Hamburg – The company Yello Strom, a wholly owned subsidiary of energy group EnBW , will seine Stromzähler künftig Twitter-fähig machen. , Wants its future electricity Twitter compatible. The gauges could be the consumption of individual customers by the minute on the internet.

Customer service on all channels “We have taken the first twitternde prototype developed and tested successfully,” said Yello current boss Martin Vesper SPIEGEL ONLINE. Was letztlich dazu führt, dass der Zähler eine Nachricht twittert, steht noch zur Diskussion. What ultimately leads to the counter a message twittert, is still under discussion. Vieles sei aber denkbar. Much, however, conceivable. So könnten beispielsweise unregelmäßig hohe Ausschläge beim Verbrauch einen Tweet an den Kunden auslösen. For example, the irregular high rashes consumers Tweet trigger to the customer. Or the counter chirped once daily for a summary of the costs.

Thanks Toxin20!

Want to build your own?

Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each  plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

Hawthorne effect with personal metrics / Nike+ via Waxy.

The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.

One thing we noticed here at Adafruit – once we started measuring our power usage with the Tweet-a-watt project we actually decreased power consumption – part of it was because we knew we were measuring it and each month when the power bill came we saw the bill go down.

Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

EnergyLogger – Nice Tweet-a-Watt add-on!

EnergyLogger is a simple, native, cross-platform application designed to take the place of the Python scripts developed for the original Tweet-A-Watt project. By providing a user-friendly GUI interface for monitoring and logging data from these wireless enabled meters, we hope to remove one of the barriers to entry when implementing this project for yourself.

In addition to tweeting daily usage statistics, EnergyLogger is able to:

• Log interval data to a CSV text file,
• Upload interval data using Google’s Data API protocol to a Google Doc spreadsheet for analysis by other Google Apps or for use by Google PowerMeter,
• Monitor energy usage and raise an alarm when load remains outside upper or lower limits for a user specified amount of time,
• and “Tweet” these alarms to a user’s Twitter account.

The data files created by EnergyLogger can be imported directly into EnergyProbe, our flagship energy analysis software delivering an inexpensive, powerful, wireless solution to record, understand and interpret energy usage which had previously cost many thousands of dollars.

The 802.15 wireless standard implemented in the XBee radios allows EnergyLogger to monitor up to sixteen separate Kill-A-Watt meters simultaneously. Data is collected approximately every 2 seconds, processed, logged and uploaded at user defined intervals.

The interface is simple to navigate, provides all the pertinent information at a glance and can be made to disappear into the system tray or menu bar, doing it’s job in the background while your computer is free to do other tasks.

Newegg.com has P3 Kill A Watt Electricity load meter and monitors for $14.99 – we use these for the Tweet-a-watt kit, so if you’re looking to get a good deal $14.99 is really good!

Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each  plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

The starter pack contains:

• 2  XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)
• 2  XBee adapter kits (ditto)
• 1  USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)
• 1  bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

This is interesting…

The CE Smart Grid in Jackson Michigan is home of Consumers Energy’s Smart Grid and Meter Test Farm. This site will receive responses from the meter groups updating their status real time.

They’re using the Tweet-a-watt!

The little power tweeter is making the engineering rounds…

MAKE Volume 18: ReMake America

ReMake America! These challenging times have presented us with a rare chance to try out new ways of doing things. The opportunities for makers are terrific — we can start at home to remake manufacturing, education, food production, transportation, and recreation. In this volume you’ll learn how to make an automatic garden, heat your water with the sun, monitor and share your home energy usage, and more in MAKE Vol 18.

Tweet-a-Watt Successfully Combines Personal Fabrication, Social Messaging, and Green Electronics by Matthew Traum @ Design News.

…the Tweet-a-Watt, monitors and reports energy consumed by appliances and electronics plugged into it. As reported in “Show of Power” in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, electricity from a capacitor runs an embedded XBee wireless module within the Tweet-a-Watt just long enough to send daily data through a computer to the Internet. There a social messaging service like Twitter displays the results.

In his 2005 book “FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication” Neil Gershenfeld describes the future of engineering design as moving away from mass production to personal fabrication. According to Gershenfeld, driven by the desire for personalized products, people will begin modifying technology by adapting commercial products for unique personal applications. A look at the Adafruit Industries Web site suggests the first wave of Gershenfeld’s personal fabrication future is already here.

SHOW OF POWER by Jeffrey Winters @ Mechanical Engineering magazine, ASME Int’l (the American Society of Mechanical Engineers).

For most people, the only time they are aware of their power consumption is when the utility bill arrives. Then, it’s tidily totaled for the month. But a gadget that would enable users to publish their daily electricity usage won a green industrial design competition in February…

Kits available!

About a month after we released the Tweet-a-watt project Google announced their power meter press/info site for the Google Powermeter, a lot of folks email us each week asking if Tweet-a-watt works with Google Power meter, we do not know. We applied to their program for smart meters a couple months ago and received this auto-responder today (see below).

If anyone works with the Google powermeter and has Tweet-a-watt working please let us know a lot of power company start ups bought the kit so we’re pretty sure someone is doing something cool

The Tweet-a-watt project will be in MAKE 18, it’s open source and uses Google’s app engine for graphing (and of course Twitter for tweets).

Thank you for your interest in Google PowerMeter. We’ve reviewed all of the submissions we received since our announcement. We’ve been very pleased to receive so many inquiries about our gadget and how we can collaborate with device manufacturers. Our goal is to enable devices to easily integrate with Google PowerMeter using our API. At the moment, we’re working hard developing the API with our utility partners but we don’t have detailed specifications for it yet. When we release the Google PowerMeter API, we hope that you will review the specifications to evaluate integrating your product with the API.

We’ve provided a bit more detail on the API on our FAQs page: http://www.google.org/powermeter/faqs.html

To keep up to date on developments related to Google PowerMeter or our energy information efforts, please join our Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/energyinformation?lnk=srg&hl=en

Thanks,
Google PowerMeter Team

Lots of Tweet-a-watts… OurWatts.com graphs energy data tweeted by Tweet-a-Watts other folks have made!… This is so cool! Via Ourwatts on Twitter!

Tweet-a-watt mention at EDN’s POWERSOURCE by Margery Conner…

In the world model of ubiquitous computing, aka, “Things that think,” significant physical objects have intelligence, temporary storage, sensing components, and often form computing networks. These wireless sensor networks are usually pretty sophisticated: One popular networking protocol is Zigbee, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard…

However, I’m seeing another approach to communications for these proliferating objects that are just so eager to talk with something: Twitter feeds. You’re probably familiar with Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that constrains posters to a brusque 140-character limit. It’s a simple yet robust method for posting 140 characters in a stream out to the world for online monitoring. Less well-known is that Twitter has a search function that’s much closer to monitoring information in real-time than Google’s search, and no wonder, since Twitter’s searchable content is a fraction of the size of the HTML pages Google attempts to keep up to date…

Just a quick note to add – Twitter is a cheap/easy/free SMS gateway, super simple for notification services for devices – it’s also fun for folks to build projects like Tweet-a-watt and show the results to their friends (or anyone else).