Today we’re excited to introduce the Google PowerMeter API on code.google.com, for developers interested in integrating with Google PowerMeter. This API will allow device manufacturers to build home energy monitoring devices that work with Google PowerMeter. We’re launching this API in order to help build the ecosystem of innovative developers working towards making energy information more widely available to consumers.

In today’s launch of the API on code.google.com we are highlighting the core design principles towards integrating with Google PowerMeter. In particular we outline the underlying data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user’s privacy and control on access to the information. We also highlight, with code samples and client implementations, how to easily start building your PowerMeter-compatible device.

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 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.

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?

I know what you’re thinking.. “not another device that tweets something!” Yup, another device that tweets something. This time it’s a humidor and it tweets that status of it’s relative humidity and temperature levels. For cigar aficionados, this means a lot. In order to keep your cigars “fresh” for any amount of time over a few days, they must be contained in an environment that is controlled with the perfect amount of relative humidity and temperature levels. The purpose of this is so that your cigars don’t dry out or get too moist which would amount to a terrible smoking experience. The Tweetidor uses a digital precision relative humidity and temperature sensor (SHT75) along with the arduino.

Stats and the tweetin’ here…

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!

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 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

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!

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!

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

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).

This project involved hacking a common Kill-a-Watt power meter to transmit data wirelessly usign an Xbee to my computer (Mac), and then upload the data to two different websites (Pachube.com & Google App Engine) to display graphically…

A much simpler and more useful alternative to plotting with Google is to use Pachube. Pachube allows you to upload your live data and share it with others. Likewise, you can use other people’s data feeds to control something locally or use many feeds to make composite plots, etc. The data is submitted using a fairly simple protocol called Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) which you can learn about at Pachube.

To upload my data, I used one of the basic python scripts available on ladyada’s site and modified it to send the data tagged in EEML using this python library python-eeml from petervizi. Here is my resulting Pachube data feed and a Flash plot…

Tweet-a-Watt is taking the trophy here. There are hacks to make things efficient, to run them on renewable energy, to make them accomplish green tasks. But one thing we love is the spark of competition to get more efficient. Tweet-a-Watt is riding the wave of the social media phenomenon and the rising awareness of efficiency among a demographic that can make the biggest difference when they adjust their habits. Those are some magic ingredients, and makes this DIY hack a winner.–J.H

More:
Make: Online wins Treehugger Award!

Using mightyohm’s tutorial to hack the ASUS router for use with the Tweet-a-watt – you don’t need a computer to report your power usage, just a hacked up Wi-Fi router (m4v).

Related:

The Tweet-a-Watt kit 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.

Tweet-a-Watt kits are now available! A few months ago, using “off-the-shelf hardware”, we modified a Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter to “tweet” (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user’s Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours). We released this project as an “Open source hardware” project – in other words, anyone can make these, modify them and make a commercial product from the ideas and methods.

After we released this project we entered it in the Greener Gadgets design contest and won first place, we donate the winnings to “Engineers without borders“.

You can see the “Tweetawatt” account on twitter here!

Here’s how it works, the modified Kill-a-Watt uses a “super-cap” to slowly recharge itself, once there is enough power it turns on the Xbee wireless module which transmits the data to a nearby computer (or internet connected microcontroller, like an Arduino) once the power usage for the day is recorded it uses a predefined Twitter account (it can be your own) to publish your daily KWH consumption for the day, multiple units can be used for an entire household.

Energy change and consumption can happen many ways, we feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH – by sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers. Our system can work with twitter, google app engine or really… anything that can display data.

We also wanted to make it easy for anyone to build these so we have released a kit based on the inquires and demand – you don’t need to be a venture backed company or a giant company with millions of dollars to make your own low cost home power monitoring system.

Please note Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meters are not included, you can get these just about anywhere for less than $20.

We have two versions of the kits…

Tweet-a-Watt starter pack

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

In stock now at the Adafruit store…

Tweet-a-Watt add-on outlet kit

This pack contains parts to make an additional outlet for your Tweet-a-Watt setup.

Included is:

• XBee module
• XBee adapter kit
• 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

Tweet-a-Watt kits are now available in the Adafruit store.

Time for part 4 of the tweet-a-watt (the project formally known as ‘wattcher’) design documentation! In this section, we play with the Google visualization widgets to save us lots of time. I will show you how to take data from the Google App Engine datastore, turn it into JSON and then make it visualization-happy for nice Flash graphs. The code is also fully available in a google code repository so hopefully people with better software skillz than I can submit patches and help out.