Since I’ve already gushed with geeky joy over gadget blogs, I feel safe bringing this (extremely useful) gizmo to your attention:
The Eco-eye is a straightforward concept: a real time accounting of energy use in your home and the corresponding carbon emission. It also displays the cost of your energy use on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
Little tools like this encourage a healthy level of guilt in our consumption of energy–inspiring us though our competitive nature to turn off the lights when we leave the room and unplug “vampire appliances” that draw energy when idle. Something like this exists in most hybrid cars: a green “ECO” lights up on the dash when the car reaches peak efficiency, and a real-time display shows the driver what mileage he or she is achieving over the course of a trip. While it’s sort of silly, these types of incentives work. Sure, we’re saving money by identifying wasteful drains on our home energy or maximizing gas mileage…but it’s also uniquely satisfying to feel like you’re driving as efficiently as possible or powering your home in a sensible way.
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This is really helpful… if it can track it so accurately, it would be interesting to see an advanced version that showed peak hours of usage so you know when you’re using electricity the most, and then you could make concious efforts to conserve at those times.
It would also be cool to be able to set some sort of alarm when the usage rate is above a certain level, or when you’re approaching a pre-defined benchmark you’ve entered. Just having the cost displayed is somewhat useful, but being able to put it into context and have it help you make decisions in real-time would make it even more so.