Measure, So You Can Improve - Take Two

Remember this?



Well, Google hasn't been sleeping on the job, and they now have the first batch of partners. See if your energy company is one of them.

SketchUp + Energy Performance, Part 6

(part 1)
(part 2)
(part 3)
(part 4)
(part 5)

OpenStudio Plugin for SketchUp, another brick in the EnergyPlus wall.

Measure, So You Can Improve

"What you cannot measure, you cannot improve".

Until recently, it was practically impossible to measure energy consumption. Kill-A-Watt was one of the first practical tools available. Still, it was pretty limited for it couldn't be used to continuously log the energy consumption (and it is being addressed), and it couldn't be used to measure the energy consumption for built-in or high consumption devices such as washers, dryers and HVACs.

Well, if you are concerned about your house energy consumption, it seems that your time is coming - Google is busy working on it. They've just announced the PowerMeter.


It will take some time. Currently, Google is building partnerships, and I'm sure we'll see tangible results soon.

UPDATE (2011/6/24): Google Power Meter is no more. Too bad.

Backward incompatible change: DZ will become JDK 1.6+ only

Jukebox, the platform DZ is built on top of, is currently undergoing a code review and enhancement process. One side effect of advanced JMX uplift is that the new Jukebox will be incompatible with JDK 1.5.

Whereas JMX is probably *the* cause to upgrade from JDK 1.5 to 1.6 (latter is the first version where it is really usable), the source code compatibility of JMX features is broken.

The improvement is so significant that I'm willing to restrict DZ to 1.6 as soon as new Jukebox is pulled in.

Speak up if you care.

Echoes: Efficient Cooling and Ventilation System (ECVS)

A team of UC Berkeley students made a very impressive implementation of DZ Testbed, powered by the MAKE Controller.

Evolution in action - the demo videos look just like DZ looked around 2002, with bang-bang damper action and all.

It would be interesting to see what eventually comes out of it - their design scope and constraints (though unpublished) are certainly different than mine.
Makes me think of the eternal dilemma - whether to go the software or the hardware way. I wonder whether it is really necessary or justified to use specialized hardware, even for $109.00, when much more powerful general purpose hardware can be bought for about the same price. The only justified application I see is mass produced, fixed functionality, no upgrade, disposable gadgets - but even then, time of such things is coming to an end. Take a look at your thermostats, or even better, your car CD player (people still drive cars with cassettes, and CD player is already obsolete), or even better, your car navigation system (how many generations of navigation systems have changed in a not-so-long lifetime of a single car?).
In any case, the prototype rocks. Still waiting for the credit to be given to DZ.

via Makezine

UPDATE (2009/10/22): The project site is gone, apparently expired as the group graduated. Regrettable. Makezine article is still there, though. I'll leave the dead links intact in hope they will get reincarnated some day.
UPDATE (2012/03/07): Project popped back on Google search, links updated.