PUBLIC MARKS with tags monitoring & électricité

Google PowerMeter is a free electricity usage monitoring tool that provides you with information on how much energy your home is consuming. Google PowerMeter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information for you on iGoogle (your personalized Google homepage). And, Google PowerMeter is free.

Lately we’ve been tinkering with deploying Android beyond the phone (using Google’s open-source Android to connect devices to each other and the web), so we thought we’d see if we could leverage the efficiency of Android on a BeagleBoard, the accessibility of wireless webcams, and the ease of a Flickr feed to a custom Google Gadget to track the ups and downs of our metered utilities. Why webcams? While there may be a few compelling (low-cost, low-impact) products out there to monitor your electric meter, there are no comparable products for reading gas or water meters. So until the really smart grid arrives, here’s a way to chart your whole utility spend on your own Google homepage.