Monitoring your Power consumption with Google

About 2 years ago i had tried out a pilot project to monitor our everyday home power usage using simple Spreadsheets. The idea was to monitor power consumption on a daily basis & have an everyday watch on how much was being spent on electricity. I found that maintaining this sheet itself helped reduce bills by quite a significant quantity.

Of Course it is necessary to remember that this experiment was carried out in Pune & in the house of a 'Kokya' ( Dont want to go into specifics of this here .. it will be enough to state here that it signifies a guy very unwilling to spend much money , as it goes against my secular upbringing to diferenciate on basis of caste- which is what 'Kokya' signifies) .

What i found was that this kind of monitoring helped in getting the people in the household to actively try to switch of unwanted power sources thus decressing the load.

I had suggested to a lot of people that if we could do this in an online application that could be shared & a kind of power saving competition helping save loads of electricity.

Reading Google's announcement of its Power Meter inspired me yet again to do something to take that initiative forward.

Read Google's official announcement here :

Official Google Blog: Power to the people: "addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energ"

It'll be still quite sometime before something like this hits our homes.. So we plan to make an application that will bridge the gap.

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