Last night at Green Drinks Boston, the buzz was about WattsOn, which is DIY Kyoto's gadget for monitoring home energy use.  I've heard a bit about this sleek little gadget before, although I haven't investigated.  I just took a gander at the website, and I'm mighty impressed!

WattsOn is a gadget that displays your current energy usage, using a sensor and transmitter which hook in to your electric meter.  The device also comes with software which allows you to monitor your usage over time, and to plug into a community of other WattsOn users.  Although I haven't tried out the device (it's apparently available in the UK, but not in the US), it appears to be designed exceptionally well - it could be a nice conversation-starter on a coffee table - and the software seems to handle most of the typical reports you'd expect.

As far as I can tell, the community tools attached to WattsOn are fairly basic - they allow you to see cumulative energy and monetary savings for the community as a whole, but that's about it.  There are plenty of other things that a community of people trying to reduce their energy usage can do - for example, review and recommend energy-efficient appliances, swap tips on the best ways to implement energy-saving practices, and so on.  Additionally, I can imagine a number of other ways to make the historical usage data available to users - e.g., over email, text message, and so forth.  Good data analysis might also reveal patterns that could help home energy users find additional savings above those offered by the typical measures, like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents.

While WattsOn is definitely a more comprehensive reporter than Tweet-A-Watt, it would be nice to get a breakdown of energy usage by room or appliance.  Depending on how it's implemented, Tweet-A-Watt is capable of creating that kind of breakdown, while WattsOn only displays aggregated usage.  On the other hand, WattsOn also takes 288 meter readings a day, so it's usually possible to reasonably approximate the reason for various spikes.  For example, if you turn on the clothes dryer around 6 pm, and see a big spike in the usage data starting at 6 and lasting for about 45 minutes, it's probably a good sign that the dryer was the cause of that spike.

WattsOn is an excellent tool in the energy efficiency arsenal.  While it's not yet available in the US, I hope it jumps across the pond soon!