I’m hoping to organise a Computer Science MSc group project on “Visualisation and Analysis of Domestic Electrical Energy Consumption”. One aim of the project is to produce an open-source app tol help people save energy by producing useful and interesting visualisations (pretty graphs) of their energy usage. The ultimate aim is to produce something a bit like Google Powermeter. But better ;)! The full spec of the group project is available here.

I’d be really eager to hear any comments / suggestions at this (very) early stage to try to make the project both lots of fun for the students and also useful to the community. Some specific questions might be:

  • Do you currently use a tool to visualise your energy use? (Such as Current Cost’s website or Cosm or open.sen.se or something similar?)
  • Are there any specific statistics / visualisations that you’d be particularly interested in?
  • Would you be interested in being able to share details of your energy use with select friends to compare progress?

(To give a bit of context: Group projects run for the duration of the spring term (11 weeks starting Jan 2013). I’m a PhD student in the computing department so I’ll be supervising the project but the detailed design is up to the MSc students. Groups usually consist of 5-6 MSc students. There are no guarantees that a group will actually want to do the project, of course!)