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Visualized in a graph:

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Numerical statistics:

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My consumption in comparison:

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My record, and what the difference would be if everyone in the country consumed by my record:

Plastic to the boxes are cut out and put togheter. Glue-free!

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Ready for the technology!

In some way electricity is an infinite resource. Electricity is an energy deliver, and energy can never disappear only transform. Electricity in itself creates no environmental pollution, and because it´s an infinite resource, it shouldn`t be a problem to use as much as we want, right?

The problem is that even though energy is infinite, the way we produce electricity today is neither infinite nor environmentally sustainable.

How much electricity can we consume before it´s too much, before it´s unsustainable? One answer is that it depends on how the electricity we use is produced, which today is hard to know!

(More info: Swedish Energy Agency)

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What to do

Everyone has always the possibility of reducing his or her personal consumtion of electricity. If the overall consumtion decreases, the production of non-sustainable electricity is also reduced. Another nice effect is that you can lower your electricity costs!

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How can Lodestar show you “how much is too much”?

Lodestar will make us aware and remind us of the products and behaviours in our homes that effect our electricity consumtion. But everyone have different living situations. It can vary widely depending on the type and size of dwelling, how many people that lives togheter, when and how much you stay at home, the variability of weather and seasons.

If Lodestar would use the same “too much” level for all, it would be difficult to identify and change my behaviour. If Lodestar on the other hand, would be built on several general models, the risk is that the data we have doesn´t match my actual consumtion.

Lodestars soultion is that “too much” is indicated with two aspects:

1. Your current usage compared to your average usage for the same period. This allows you to receive alerts if your usage is more than usual and you can even see your long-term trend.

2. Our common use of Lodestar community. You can choose to compare your profile with someone else or select a profile you think has a similar life situation as you. From this you can draw conclusions about whether you consume “too much” or not.

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The picture shows how a graph might look at Lodestars webservice.

Sign up for our first round of interviews, and you will have a chance to get a Lodestar of your own for free. We need a selection of people with different needs and attitudes towards energy consumption, computer experiences and social networking. The interview will take place in your household and it will take about 30 minutes. Among those who take part in the interview, 15 persons will get a chance to participate in the first beta release of Lodestar.

 Fill in this questionnaire to sign up for an interview:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=b_2bLE151ZIKhoxsRvq9TjcQ_3d_3d

Lodestar has a logo!

In previews post Say hello to Lodestar! the meaning behind the name Lodestar is explained as a guiding star and a role model.

The logo shape can be seen as a star — a Lodestar that guiding us in our energy consumtion with light, colour and direction. The four directions in the logo also symbolize the different states of the gadget; upper vertical (Community), right horizontal (Trend), left horizontal (Test) and lower vertical (Numeral Watt Now).

The font used is called Diavlo and is originally made by Jos Buivenga.

Hope you like the look!

Here are some examples of how the test function can be used:

The consumption is set to zero when the gadget is turned to test position. (See display functions in Form for Direction). When you then turn one or more products ON or OFF the gadget shows the difference in watts.

- How much energy can I save when turning OFF my computer?

- I wonder how much energy my Tv uses? Turn ON the Tv.

- If I turn ON the Tv and also the surround sound, then what is the energy usage?

Go check it out, here’s a link to an English version of the page via Google Translate if you don’t speak Swedish.

(If you need a quick background on what the project is about, check the blog post “EcoElectricity, the first project in Lab1″, as well as the other posts on this blog. Basically it’s about hooking a smart electricity meter wirelessly to a display gadget, a cloud database and a web app where you can keep track of your energy usage as well as interact and discuss with other users.)

The project is called Lodestar from now on. According to various dictionaries and encyclopaedias, a lodestar means a guiding star used for navigation. A more contemporary use is in the sense of a role model, an example to follow. This fits perfectly in line with the usage and reasoning behind our product: the light from the gadget display is sort of a guiding star for your electricity usage, and the same goes for the various forms of visualizations that you access via the web. In the social aspect of becoming more aware of usage patterns, both in yourself and others—individually and aggregated, you may find, or act as, a role model for using less energy.

Apart from the general meaning of the word, there’s also the “load”-pronounciation hidden in the word (as in “electricity load”), and within that, “Low” as in lower consumption. So yes, it may contain traces of pun, if you’re allergic to that.

So, what do you think?

The amount of data being transferred from the meter (for the moment a semi buggy simulator written in Java) to the web is quite large and we needed a way to compress this data. Mostly for shorting query times but also we thought that being able to view consumption data for a Wednesday half a year ago with second granularity was a bit unnecessary.

The solution turned out to be storing the raw data for a couple of days, then generalize all aged data points within an hour to an average for that hour. This approach reduces the number of entities in the database approximately with a factor 200! But, it also means that data that has been measured by the meter, and then travelled half the globe are being thrown away. Therefore we might offer the ability to download this data and store it locally. A form of recycle bin you might say. If you’re not interested in storing the data locally, and still want to keep fine granularity, there’s a second way. In the “advanced mode” on the Website you will be able to mark an interval in a diagram and store all data points within this interval, keeping them safe from cleanup algorithms. After giving the interval a note you can share it with your friends.

The picture below shows some new ideas about the form and display function.

From prior suggestions we kept LED-displays and preference change by movement. The new form looks like an arrow when lying down, and a house when standing up. This symbolizes different aspects of what is shown at the displays and what’s actually measured, hence the power consumption in homes. The “house windows” can also create a feeling for the social aspect in this projects ecosystem of involvement (Meter-Web-Gadget).

One aspect that is relevant most of the time we think is the real-time indication and direct feedback of your power usage.  Therefore this is shown at a LED-bar on one side of the gadget.

The gadget is still under progress… nice to hear what you think!