+ New Products Visualize Home Energy Use

About a year ago, we created our Current State concept to visualize home energy use. Since then we've seen a growing interest in the subject and there are two interesting articles about products that make this concept more of a reality.

Make created Tweet-a-watt, an open source piece of hardware that posts your data to Twitter. Tweet-a-watt captures and documents energy use but takes the idea a step further, by letting your friends and followers also track your energy use. In theory, this could create competition among neighbors or family members to be the most responsible energy users. Tweet-a-watt is an entry to Core77's Greener Gadgets competition, so if you like it let them know!

Appliance Design also continues to be a great resource for us. Electronics: Powerline Potential discusses an affordable technology called PLC (powerline communications). According to the article, PLC allows devices to communicate through our electrical lines, so it's an existing, low-cost technology that we're beginning to use in a new way: precise and efficient energy usage for homes and buildings.