Home Camp

So, clearly I don’t write many posts here. I get all sorts of good ideas about the topics I’m interested in, and some of them almost form into solid enough arguments that would be worthy of my writing something about them. A couple of reasons prevent me posting them, however. Firstly I’m either too busy/lazy/etc. to actually sit down and write them, and secondly I never really feel it’s worth it given the tiny readership. No doubt the latter is a result of the former, though I’ve never made the effort to investigate what would happen if I actually posted decent content.

Anyway, in an effort to add content about the things I’m interested in, I thought I’d post a note to say I plan on attending Home Camp on 29th November. Home Camp is an ‘unconference’ about using technology to monitor and automate things in your house, with a view to reducing your overall energy consumption – your ‘carbon footprint’ (though I don’t like that phrase).

I’m a great fan of using data as a way to encourage changes in behaviour – there’s a lot of scientific evidence of this sort of feedback working well in medicine, and I think it transfers easily to many other scenarios. People dieting often become obsessive about checking their weight, creating a sort of Pavlovian response – eating cake results in weight gain, which results in guilt. The data provided by the scale encourages you not to eat cake.

People have a general lack of awareness of the amount of energy (or resources in general) that they consume – the average consumer is only aware of their electricity and gas usage when the quarterly bill arrives. This is often exacerbated by a fixed monthly payment, so you almost never notice variations in consumption.

Using devices such as a Wattson are a good start, but I’d ideally like to see the impact of every appliance on my consumption of electricity, gas, and water. When set against the backdrop of the ‘credit crunch’, if there was a cheap and easy way to see how much money one would save by just boiling a mug’s worth of water instead of a kettle-ful, I can imagine that there’d be a huge reduction in energy usage across the country, saving money and the planet in one go. What we really need is a series of cheap, simple, open-standard devices that can provide this data to consumers.

So I’m looking forward to Home Camp – whilst not being a hardcore techie, it appeals to the combination of tech-geekiness and eco-geekiness that I seem increasingly fond of. I’m hoping to learn a lot more about the state of the market for this kind of device, and how to get at this kind of data and do useful things with it.  If you happen to stumble across this post, and you’re a likeminded fellow, sign up and come along!