wattson

So I bought a Wattson yesterday. Partly out of enthusiasm over the new Howies shop, partly out of genuine ambient eco-curiosity, but quite a lot so I'd have something to talk about at this tomorrow. It's a simple, clever thing that tells you how much electricity you're using. It tells you in £s, it tells you in watts, and it tells you with an ambient glow. And it's incredibly simple to set up. The video above is the Wattson in our kitchen (dig the crazy worksurface) with me turning the fluorescent light on and off.  So the figures represent what our annual bill would be if we left it on the whole time, versus sitting in the dark for a year.

In some ways it's just a silly, indulgent, middle-class eco-worrier, gadget freak toy. It's been perfectly possible to sensibly manage your electricity consumption for years. It's just we never have.

And the Wattson makes it a playful, easy activity. So far we've sat and asked ourselves, how much is our annual bill? do we know? how many watts do we use? is that above or below average? how much are we actually paying for our electricity? (the machine defaults to a typical UK price but can be adjusted). This is stuff that a lot of people just don't think about that much.

And then immediately we started playing with it, because it's presence encourages you to think about your consumption. Arthur insisted that the first thing we did was see how low we can get it:

That's everything in the flat turned off, except for the fridge. And the Wattson itself, which is obviously, slightly ironic. It's made us all much more conscious about what we're leaving on and what we're using. And I don't think it's just a novelty, I think it might be like driving a hybrid car, where the interface gives you a different implied goal in the game of driving - maximum fuel efficiency.

The website says that there will soon be a community aspect to the Wattson, and it's got a USB hole which must be useful for something. I'm hoping it'll be a way to see how your consumption compares to others, which will also be useful, but, more importantly, it'll be competitive, like nike+. Then it'll really be fun.

The big problem with it at the moment is the unit price, it's a lot, £150. That makes it mostly a bourgeois indulgence. But hopefully that's just the effect of it being a fringe-ish device not expecting to sell a lot of units. Once this idea kind of idea is embedded into every fusebox or fridge as a low-cost, component then it might start to make a difference to the way we play with and use electricity. Because it obviously be ideal if we didn't try and solve every consumption problem by buying new, powered gadgets.

Comments

[Stefan G. Bucher]

Cool gizmo! Do you know if there's a desktop widget that tells you how much wattage the computer and all the peripherals are sucking down, both in active and dormant states? Until they put a Wattson into every freezer door, that would be a nice start.

[Víctor de Tena]

Yeah, it's a cool gadget for change the behaviour "turn off the light". This is another interesting gadget http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/t-qualizer-music-tee/index.html. It's perfect when someone shouts you and say: "No, I never shout"... well, you can demostrate.

[funkypancake]

i wonder how your usage of it will change over time - whether you'll become obsessed or blind to it ?

perhaps you'll start using it as a reading light and find yourself switching the immersion on just so the light gets a bit brighter !

alternatively, there must be some money to be made renting these out cheaply to friends. £10 a week would be a good price.

i always recon those spyder devices for setting up the colour on your PC monitor would be a good thing to rent instead of buy too.

perhaps there's a business here somewhere. best not mention it to anyone else though hey ?

[Paul Mison]

Hopefully the price of such gadgets will come down as they face competition from smart meters, which the Goverment's recent energy policy white paper recommend as a compulsory thing.

Of course, that's the sort of thing that has the more idiotic papers yelping about "gas and electricity spies in your home". I wonder what they think existing meters do?

URLs, as your comment form seems to strip HTML:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6225938.stm
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/7829

[Dan Hill]

I think this device is super-important. We'll see more of them - there's one called iFaucet (or something terrible) for water usage in real-time too. Then network all these together to give a real-time energy profile for the home. Then aggregated to enable you to see streets, districts. Then you can 'game' each other to see which of your neighbours is wrecking your street's average etc. Will either lead to the salvation of humanity or post-Ballardian punctures in the fabric of society. Either way, super-important.

[Amelia]

Brilliant - I am doing a gadget piece for the Spectator, love this!