Obviously john really has no clue as to what greener is. I seriously doubts he unplugs his TV and microwave every night before he goes to sleep. I mean who wants to reprogram that stupid blinking clock every freaking day?

The Watcher is a good product, it deserved to win, kudos to you both.

Cool. Any chance of a write up of that?

What irritates me is people that put down a device or a product. There are uses for them, or they wouldn’t be out. People are buying them so they obviously find them useful. Just because “YOU” don’t doesn’t mean that it doesn’t fit some one ease’s needs perfectly. I think this is a great project. Keep up the good work guys.

Roman.

i like the direction of conferences like greener gadgets, it’s too bad you can’t post comments about all the wasteful things at CES and have the designers respond like we have. hype would assume that it doesn’t live up to its claims, but it did, it does and now we’ve released a computer-less version.

you said “But as for the gadget itself, more hype than an American Idol judges comment.”

we’ve never watched that tv show or own a tv – what does that mean, is it a snark or something?

ladyada and pt…good for you both for having the know how to do such things. I really do applaud that.

But as for the gadget itself, more hype than an American Idol judges comment.

http://flickr.com/photos/ladyada/tags/tweetawatt/

and hey, if you turn off your wifi router at night, then at least you’re collecting power data during the day!

ps. i did measure the power my soldering iron uses to sear my conscience aaaand it takes about 25Wh. ouch! better recycle some more soymilk boxes!

hit google and check out the hyped up VC funded “internet aware” power meter companies (including google!). what we did is show it’s possible to do this: cheap, smart, open source and use existing hardware. we also tried to make sure no one could patent this obvious idea – sharing power usage is happening and going to happen – we just did it this way first and for “free”.

poop away, it’s good for fertilizer :)

In many people cases, that computer may be running anyway. I know mine is, but it’s also my web server, email handler, data logger, and a handful of other things.

I’d be willing to bet you’d find more Linux boxes that are on 24/7 than Windows users, given the nature of what we do with them.

Oh wait, it requires a person to keep the internet connection on all the time at home even when that person is not home…since tweet-a-watt requires twitter. That also mean you have to leave a computer on all day….so basically one has just negated the purpose of killawatt types things.

Yes I will poop on something like a killawatt and tweetawatt, as the device itself is almost totally devoid of usefull application. Though the fridge measuring and moving the fridge from the wall is usefull…so there, at least one good thing about it.

But otherwise its just a bunch of hype. Such hype is prone to people who think they are being “green”.

since i co-developed the tweet-a-watt, i guess i’ll ask you a question back… so instead of actually trying to prevent unnecessary and absolutely wasteful power consumption, you would rather waste energy by posting comments on a web site, on a computer, over the net – all of which uses tons of energy?

you also said “And to top it all off you would like to have device that wastefully consumes energy to tell you how much energy you are wasting….How eco-friendly of you” – do you know how much power it uses? do you know how we did it? it seems you do not. if we figure out just few small ways to simply cut back power because of this device we made it’s less power than the tweet-a-watt would take all year for the most part.

and lastly “I turn everything off when I am not home and when I go to bed. It just lazy to think “Oh its too hard to plug things and be eco friendly””

do you pull your fridge away from the wall? try other dryer settings? these are things we are measuring and will save lots of $$.

maybe you’re fine with what you’re doing – but there’s no reason to poop on people’s projects who are sharing their work and trying to make things better.

In my apartment, they were apparently too lazy to install lights in the ceilings in the bedrooms and living room, but that actually turned out to my benefit. The wall switches are wired to the sockets, so I plugged my television into the socket on the switch and when I leave the room I can flip it off and power down the TV, DVD player, DTV tuner, lights, etc.

Then, I just plugged the lamp into an X10 and use my remote to turn the light on or off instead (which supports my laziness while watching movies better than getting up to flip off the light anyway).

http://www.stahlke.org/dan/powermeter/

And to top it all off you would like to have device that wastefully consumes energy to tell you how much energy you are wasting….How eco-friendly of you. What did your killawatt read for your iron before it was hot enough for you to sear your conscience as to you wasteful practices?

I turn everything off when I am not home and when I go to bed. It just lazy to think “Oh its too hard to plug things and be eco friendly”