12-11-2008 by dan
As I sit here in my home office, with the heat turned down to an economical 62 degrees, I can’t help but wonder if I couldn’t just raise that thermostat 1 degree and be slightly more comfortable. I’m sure everyone has experienced this at some point.
If I were running a utility company, I’d come up with a way for the customer to monitor her daily (or even hourly!) utility consumption. You could log in to the utility company’s website, look at line graphs of your usage by hour,day, week, month, year. You could look at averages. Compare yourself to other homes in your neighborhood or city, or even to other homes with similar characteristics to your home. Estimate your costs based on a marginal change in usage and your current usage patterns.
If there were only a way to read the utility meters into a computer, this would be very simple to put together. It might even be profitable to the Utility company, because they could sell partnership deals or ad space to other companies that would help you lower your utility consumption. (think about calculating your heating cost per square foot, and if it’s higher than the average, a little ad shows up next to the report for a local weather sealing company) Having all that data in hand would also help the company understand its own demand better.
