Wattson

What's on, wattson?
by Graeme Clark

How can this funky looking box help you save energy? By making energy-saving fun and informative, as well as lining your pocket. Kustom PCs goes green (or rather more towards purple / blue) with Wattson...

OK, so e-day didn't really work - maybe it wasn't publicised enough, people didn't care or the idea was just a flop. The concept was that on February 27th we all had to try and save power by switching off non-essential devices for the day to see what kind of effect this could have on our energy use as a whole. Unfortunately power consumption was actually 0.1% above average on that day - so maybe one or all of the above factors worked against it, or just a lot of people wanted an extra cup of tea that day.

Really though - energy conservation is not just about going back to living in the dark ages, it's quite amazing how much power we do waste. Kustom already is a relatively careful company with regards to energy use... we no longer have any CRT screens and every PC excluding the server is switched off at night anyway. I wondered if there were other ways to save power - step in Wattson. This kit allows you to monitor your power use in real time (displaying the consumption in watts and a projected yearly cost) but also records information and charts energy use via a USB connection to your PC.

First up, you need to attach the sensor clip to the incoming cable on your electricity meter. No electrical ability is required, it's just a plastic clip with a sensor coil that snaps on to the existing cable in your fuse box. The sensor runs off 4 'AA' batteries which can last up to 6 months, and includes a small aerial. This will provide wireless communication to the Wattson base at up to 100 metres range in open air or about 30 metres through walls. Our electricity meter is actually outside the shop premises, but the signal transmits fine indoors.

Next, plug in your Wattson. All being well it should find the sensor straight away and start displaying power use, but if you recieve a 'not paired to sensor' message as we did, you'll need to hold the button on the transmitter for a few seconds and then push a paperclip into the 'reset' switch on the wattson which should resulted in a 'pairing succesful' message. That one does not seem to be mentioned on the manual, but thank you to the manufacturers DIY Kyoto for their fast response to my plea for help !

Wattson will glow to show your power use - blue for low, fading through purple and then red as power consumption increases. You'll no doubt spend your initial time with wattson watching it change colour as you switch things on and off and find out how much power all your stuff consumes. For the first couple of days of having our Wattson set up, I would run back to it as I shut up the shop at the end of the day to see the power drop as each item was powered down - purely for later research purposes, of course. Or was it maybe because Wattson actually makes the idea of saving power kind of... fun? Possibly.

...Likely.

Next, you will want to hook it up to a PC or Mac and install the 'Holmes' software (available fromhere ). Holmes is Wattsons partner and allows you to monitor your power use by the hour, day or month as well as track averages and set targets. Not only does it show graphs on energy use (KW/H) - it will show total watts used per day, a running cost per day and a calculated carbon footprint per day. On initial setup you can choose to enter an updated electricity rate or choose 'advanced rates' which allows separate day / night rates to be specified, as well as any standing charges if applicable.

Once the initial fun is out of the way, you'll probably want to just let it sit and record data for a week in your normal lifestyle just so that you have a benchmark. A cynical approach may question leaving on an 'energy saving' device all the time, but Wattson uses a mere 4W of power when the glowing mode is enabled or 1W of power in 'energy saving mode' which disables the glow and reduces the brightness of the character display. It has a battery too, and should run for about 5 hours in it's full-blown glowing status or the best part of a day in energy saving mode. My slight error at first was sometimes forgetting to switch off the glow at the end of the day, and hence our first week has reduced use on a couple of days as it ran out of power during the night...

The most relevant point here though is that initially we were using about 37 kW/h of energy per day, on a fairly steady average.

Following this, we started taking some steps to reduce our energy use - the biggest eye opener though was lighting - the tube lights in our stock area alone used up a significant 1350W of power, instantly sending Wattson towards the red. So since some of the fittings were fitted with two tubes, I realised that we could still keep the stock room adequately illuminated with some of the bulbs removed. Straight away, this was a huge saving - switching on the lights there now only uses 750W of power, a saving of 600W straight away.

Additionally, all store lighting (320W) and items such as the demo computer (about 200W) and wall-mounted LCD TV (150W) are only switched on literally as the store opens, and items such as speakers are now all left switched off (40W usage) until they're actually needed. The difference between switching those on at 10am instead of 9am and switching off at 5pm instead of later on adds up to make another reasonable saving. On Saturdays, lighting in the store room is only switched on when needed rather than being left on through the day.

So did it make a difference? Yes, definitely - our power use is now typically 26 - 28 kW/H per day and only 19.8 on Saturday. Quite a big difference for only minimal effort really, the 10kW/H per reduction on weekdays should result in a saving on our electricity bill of £383 per year. Wattson has not only paid for itself already, but we've trimmed our running costs a little, and there's plenty of things that can go towards ! (like recycled carrier bags - see our June blog)

What's next? Well, I'm about to go on another power saving binge - I believe between things like network hubs, fax, monitors and printers still left on overnight there's scope to save more power here. I've just made a trial run and found that about 150W of power can be saved by switching these devices off at the wall overnight. I'm also going to look at the installation of more energy efficient lighting in the stock area and another article is forthcoming regarding energy efficient computing - it may be a good opportunity to refresh some of our computers a little at the same time.

Check back soon for an update... In the mean time, make some use of the e-day website. While the project itself didn't really work too well, the website itself has loads of useful tips on energy use reduction for the home or office.

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And a final piece of eye-candy - here's how Wattson reacts to devices being switched on and off. First I switch on the lights in the office, then the drinks fridge and you'll hear switches clicking again as the shop lights and store lights are switched on. Wattson recieves information from the sensor coil every few seconds so it generally updates quickly.

http://www.youtube.com/v/HUlaV20keB0