EnergyHub: Analytics For Energy

If you’ve ever kept track of your finances, you’ve probably noticed that keeping an eye on your wallet often has an effect on what you buy. Sure, it might not always stop you from buying stuff that you don’t really need, but it makes you think a little more before making your purchase. EnergyHub’s new energy tracking panel applies the very same concept to household energy usage in an attempt to reduce home energy usage by as much as 20%.

People act differently when they can visualize abstract things like energy usage or web site visits in the form of a colorful pie graph or a simplistic table. With EnergyHub, anyone can visualize his or her home’s energy consumption in real-time and even in comparison to the past.

To put things in perspective, let’s say that you’ve been setting your thermostat to a cool 74° this month. With EnergyHub, you can see the spike in energy usage (and cost) that’s presented by your one degree drop from 75° and, most likely, opt to revert to your more energy efficient and cheaper setting from the month before.

This concept can also be applied to any number of other common household energy dilemmas including leaving the lights on and spending too much of your morning in the shower. With EnergyHub, the difference between ten and twenty minutes in the shower is no longer a thing of abstraction but a yellow, red, and blue graph that’s much easier to understand.

Though the device isn’t yet readily available, it has already garnered quite a bit of attention thanks to its recent success as a semi-finalist in MIT’s Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Competition. With the potential to dramatically impact the nation’s household energy usage (assuming its adoption, of course), EnergyHub is well worth watching in the coming years.

(Via Inhabitat)