ENERGY MONITORING WEEK: collecting the data

As I've mentioned before, I have a love-hate relationship with gadgets: I love it when they're up and running and improving my life in new and exciting ways, but I have a phobia of manuals and want as little to do with their inner workings as possible. For this reason, I'd been assuming I was having a rare stroke of beginners' luck with the Wattson: it was all so easy and user-friendly that surely something had to go wrong sooner or later.

And I had convinced myself that this 'catastrophe' was going to occur at this phase of the experiment: the data collection. Read on to find out if my pessimism was well-founded.

What actually happened was I quickly downloaded the software (known as 'Holmes'), attached the Wattson via a foolproof USB cable and hey presto, results began to appear on my screen. Like the fuss over the Large Hadron Collider, it seemed my predictions of disaster had been mere hysteria, as this software really is fantastically simple.

Holmes lets you look at your energy usage in a number of ways, so you can figure out how much money you've spent on electricity in a week, for example. It will break down the data in a number of nifty ways, from a day-by-day graph (the day I moved in was intersting...let's just say I hope that spike was just a reflection of a natural 'nesting instinct' that will die down) which can then be viewed as weeks or months.

Of course, seeing your usage represented on screen like this is a fantastic motivational tool, and the software also lets you set goals for yourself. The data we actually collected will be discussed here next week, when I should have some figures to compare from the other testers!

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