My natural gas use is measured in therms, so thats how I'd like to input it. I have no problem discussing more universally friendly ways to compare our data, but I don't want to restrict people to input everything in kWh. Not sure if thats what you meant or not.

Converting everything to kWh isn't a bad idea though for comparison sake.

Sorry if I wasn't clear: there should be many possible ways to enter how much of what you've used. "Native units" as Robert called them. These get automatically converted to some internal unit, so that we're dealing only with apples, or only with oranges. My vote is that kWh be the internal unit, not therms (but input in therms should still be an option).

Most important right now is to get this tracker working, then we can focus on the UI.

Wallet weight
 

One measurement that a lot of people use, is placing their wallet on a scale.. ;)

I don't know much about CO2, but I do like to save money.
When I look at my bills for electrical/kwh & fuel oil/gallons, I can tell how well we are doing overall.

For more precision, I try to factor in the local weather data.
Mostly, I use the average temperature data.
Weather Station History : Weather Underground
I can scroll down and click on the [Comma Delimited File] button and download for Excel.
I have found the local(Boston) published 'degree days' info isn't very useful,
since it does not seem to account for the solar gain we get on sunny days.


Using my history data, I know my daily Sanyo use is going to be about 6 to 8 kwh when the average outdoors is near 40 deg F.
When it's cloudy most of the day and 40 dF, I expect to use just under 10 kwh/day. (About 2 USD).


My point is, record some history as a baseline and then you can make changes and see the results pretty quickly..
I know from experience, that if you want good data, make one change at a time.. :o

Yeah, we'll add a cost/unit to each unit entry.

Yep cost is important to me, the reason I break my cost up into usage,taxes and fees is I've noticed that although we've had very small increases in the cost/kwh we're gradually getting more and more fees and taxes added to the cost. This has resulted in my bills going from 90% being usage charges to low 80's being usage charges while we still get to hear how we have some of the lowest rates in north america and prices won't be increasing...

I don't even look at my actual cost of Kw hours. It's not relevant at all.

(I think it might be around 12 cents?) I always recalculate the kwh rate using the total cost.
Which is currently between 20 & 21 cents per kwh..
The Efergy power monitor connected to the Sanyo rounds off to the penny,
so I just use 21 cents, to keep it ballparked.

We spent $11.30 cents last week. $1.61 per day to heat this house.
That is way less than burning a few gallons of oil every day.. :eek:

holy crap, I've been complaining because it used to be 6.7 cents/kwh and it's now costing me as high as 8.1 cents/kwh.

21 cents/kwh would sure put some serious conservation in place in this province. It would also bankrupt a bunch of people I'm sure.


Back on topic, I'm not sure if you want to implement specific usage monitoring in the tracker or not. I also track my laundry usage, # of loads cold/hot number dried/partially dried/clothesline dried and all the associated kwh/co2 calculations on that.

Seconded. It is the logical choice.

I'm planning on adding a timeline function so you can tag specific renovations along a graph. But this is more of a pie in the sky future thing, so for now use the notes as Tim suggested :p

Hey guys,

Test pages up at: EcoRenovator Energy Tracker - EcoRenovator

Super rough, so keep that in mind. Just wanted to let you guys know how it was progressing. Let me know what fields you want added in and I'll get to it.

Benjo