Google PI
Today is March 14th, for some that’s 3.14 (pi, π) day. Pi is the greek symbol representing the constant which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Google often takes the opportunity to acknowledge an interesting day (or date) on its front page, and they did so today as you see from the image/link. The word google has a good number of circles in the letters and the number that “googolplex” represents is a one followed by a very, very large number of zeros (read more at the googolplex wikipedia link). So today is PI Data day for me — an opportunity to blog about techy stuff.
Specifically, this blog is about data collection and information. I enjoy trying to make information out of data. Data by itself is generally quite boring and difficult to understand. But if we can use that data to provide information, we can use then use the information to improve systems… like to reduce our energy use, for instance. [See other blogs on "Weather or Not", "Data Logging -Real Information", and "Can We Share our Energy Data"]
Over the last 3 months I have installed a weather station and an electrical energy meter in the house I’m renting, and the first half of a solar hot water heating system with a storage tank and solar collector at the house we are renovating, “78 Main St“. All of these devices are collecting data for me… but it will take me a while to be able to present that data into a form that is real information.
Here is what I have so far.
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Weather Station – The image to the left is one that I can get from a local computer connected to the Davis Vantage Vue monitor inside my house. I mounted a metering system outside… and it sends data to the inside monitor.
They provide a pretty good view into the data. What we are seeing is current information, which tells me temperature, humidity, rainfall and a few other things. I call this “information” because a quick glance can tell me to put on a coat going outside, or that the barometer is still falling so it will probably continue raining for a while. This data logger can also send data to my website, which is what I would really like to do. Then I can post some current and historic information on my webpage and get it from any where in the world. |
 Weather Station |
| Electric Monitor – The image to the left is my ‘google meter’ which is connected to ‘The Energy Detective’ (TED) at my home. In this case the TED is providing data, and Google has come up with a way to turn that into information. The image shows me that I used a lot of electricity from about 9am to 11am this morning, which is true. It is a Sunday morning and we made bacon and eggs, and took a shower (I have electric hot water). The other thing I can see from this image is that every 3 hours or so I get a spike in energy usage. This occurs even when I’m not home and during the night. It didn’t take long for me to realize that my old electric hot water heater loses a couple of degrees every hour and so it starts up the heating elements every three hours. Time to replace that system! (I’m renting this house, so I’m not actually going to replace it… but the owner should). |
 TED Google meter |
Solar Heating System – This image is from the solar hot water heating system at my future house; not at the rental. The first half of the system was installed just a few weeks ago and we are starting to get data. Notice in the picture on the right there are lists of numbers. This is pretty difficult to read and make sense out of… it’s just data. Kent is working with me on storing and graphing this data so we can get real information out of it and access that information from a webpage. |
 TSS Controller Data |
Integrating all this data into one big database that will let us view and graph it as information will take a few months… but its an exciting project and after we’ve gotten through it we can help others who might want to understand their energy usage data.
We also had blueberry pie last night in celebration of PI day.
