Wattvision's (YC W09) down and dirty energy management dreams | Hacker News Reader

Wattvision's (YC W09) down and dirty energy management dreams

earth2tech.com

32 pointssavrajsingh11 comments

If anyone wants to be on the private 'alpha' send a mail to info [at] wattvision.com with a digital photo of your electricity meter. Also, one minor factual issue (already pinged Katie) Wattvision is not a year and a half old. The company received YC funding in Jan '09. ;)

US Only I assume? Or are you eyeing off the rest of the world this quickly?

There's no reason we can't support non-US users. :)

Does it work with digital meters or only analog ones?

It works with both types of meters.

Funny, a while ago I rolled out my own version of this, even dirtier than the Wattvision solution. My users would go to the website, put in the digits displayed on their meter, and get a nice chart showing their consumption.

Accuracy obviously depends on how often you enter your meter count but it was fine for shared flats that needed to split their electricity bill and sublets.

We're using it for our shared flat and I still think it would be a good holdover until dynamic meters are rolled out everywhere. I even thought up a fitting domain name and put the app online. Before I even got any users, though, some marketing company got wind of it and offered me a load of money for the domain name - so I sold it.

I'll put it back online once I think of a new name but it's low priority. I'm not sure how many people would actually bother with putting in their data.

I recently realized that it might be possible to just point a webcam at the meter and somehow read the digits off that (I'd really like to have a way to log that electronically).

The trend in Germany seems to be for power providers to offer the data via web, though. They are not there yet, but test programs are already being rolled out (some transmitting the data via the power line, others using DSL).

Even just having online access to the overall consumption would be so nice. It would then probably be easy to create twittering washing machines and coffee makers on top of that...

DanW did a project where his house's energy consumption is automatically tweeted. Raw data is gathered by a very cheap device that clips onto the main power inlet to the house.

http://appril.org/post/93599990/the-tweeting-house

Very interesting, thanks!

Nice hit!

This is pretty funny:

Wattvision also hopes to add in smart social networking features (Singh previously worked at Microsoft)

Large buildings(the ones who spend large amounts of money on HVAC related energy consumption) are already putting up a shadow electricity meter which counts the pulses. The data is then read using a LonWorks(wired)/Zigbee (wireless) meters which have web/SOAP interface.

If Wattvision can come up with sub $100 equipment, then this will get interesting.

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