By adTumbler on

open4energy started life as a live resume' for an out of work sales engineer in April 2009

Thanks to the simplicity of implementing Drupal, the readily available themes and 3rd party modules it did not take long to have a home page and my thoughts on open source energy saving for data centers written up and published.

Thanks to clean url's I was able to make a reasonable effort at search engine optimization and give the page an url that made actually made sense to Google and others.

I knew that Cacti, an open source project for graphing time series data, offered possibilities for data center energy management. It took quite some effort to get Cacti working, so being a reasonable open source citizen I decided to write up what I had learnt as a tutorial for others to follow. The solutions to the issues were all available if you searched diligently, but this brought them together, and addressed some specific issues for Ubuntu.

To my surprise really, I am an engineer of limited capabilities, the pages generated a steady stream of readers and reader appreciation. I take no credit for the stability of the site, 1and1 do a fine job of supporting a Drupal install, and it was clear that the pages were being served reliably.

With the steady readership, by adding the Google analytic module, I found that the pages had been indexed by Google, how they were being found, and how they were being used.

But, there are only some 20 people each day who need to know anything about configuring Cacti on Ubuntu, and obviously far far less who needed an out of work sales engineer who published tutorials. So I published an article, challenging the attitude to open source energy saving, questioning the conventional wisdom on how much energy a server actually used, and found an ally in another Drupal based energy site called Vertatique.

Traffic went up by 5%, at least one additional reader each day. It would take some miracle if this was to change my earnings potential. There is only so much time you can send our resume's each day, so looking around the apartment, and equipped with a Wattsup energy monitor, I looked at what energy I could monitor. If data centers in the Bay Area did not want my offer of FREE monitoring in exchange for writing a case study, I would use my home office and my laptop.

The first home energy monitoring article, and examination of the annual cost of charging a Blackberry may not have made a change to the worlds carbon footprint, but it opened our first Forum, and registered our first subscriber. And so it has progressed. The forum module allowed me to organize the growing list of energy forums into containers. The XML sitemap module allowed me to tell Google about the 100 pages of content that had been written by now. User traffic was up another 50%. thanks to family, we finally made it past 50 visits in a single day by October.

But there are advantages to being one of two fish, in pond for five. Trystan in England and I are committed to open source energy monitoring, but we are somewhat alone it seems. Not sure what the open source community thinks of home energy monitoring, but by the traffic I have some concerns.

Maybe Google will own this with TED, time will tell?

If you cannot beat them join them I was told. So we added the many commercial home energy monitors to the rather short list (only one) of open source home energy monitors and began to let people know it existed. My thanks to Chris at MapAWatt who recognized we were serious about wanting to raise energy awareness amongst the home energy saving community.

Our list of home energy monitors has been expanded into three lists; home energy monitors, home energy saving devices and home energy management systems.

I felt we had too much information on energy monitoring (this market will need to consolidate soon) and began to question how it translated into "save energy use". The answer is not at all, unless you do get up and something. Energy monitoring will increase your home energy awareness, the article that has become open4energy's battle cry. Without energy awareness no energy saving can take place, but without turning this awareness into action no energy saving will take place.

To my surprise open4energy had become an opinion leading source of information on home energy monitoring. It is sad to me that we can hold this Google ranking, and still be fewer than 100 unique visitors per month, but we believe this must change. In late December we added a section on CFL lighting, and once again are working to tell the internet they are worth reading. Rather than join a large list of opinions, I used a wattsup smart circuit 20 to monitor the actual lighting energy use in our apartment over a 4 day period. Two days with the original incandescent bulbs, and then 2 days with the new CFL bulbs. I was surprised, the CFL light bulbs really do save 75%.

As I explored CFL light bulbs, I realized that they honestly do have a lower power factor than incandescent bulbs. But I happen to know a little about power factor. A lower power factor does not mean lost energy it means out of phase energy. And yes this is not ideal, but the utility companies have it well understood in their billing and energy distribution models. Most of all I know that it does NOT affect a home owners electricity bill.

So I was surprised to see the number of products being promoted to save consumer electricity bills by correcting consumers power factor. I knew immediately it was a scam, but finding content to support this was much harder than I expected. A search for "power factor scams" returned more pages claiming saving, testimonials, even scam rebuttals.

To keep the story short open4energy has just published the first comprehensive list of home energy saving scams. And they go far beyond power factor correction, which I encourage any reader to understand a little about. The government incentives to help encourage consumers to save energy has been embraced by the fraudsters. Please be cautious on what information you believe on energy saving. DIY windmills, DIY solar panels and magnets with perpetual motion are just not possible.

We are poised to become a major factor in eliminating scam energy savings schemes, and whatever the end looks like, that will have been worth every keystroke. And if you do Google "open source energy saving" you will find us, near the top evangelizing away, and right next to it, an energy scams lists warning those who think there are easy answers.

But, here is why I am posting this story. Open4Energy, thanks to Drupal , has been built by a sales engineer who cared about energy saving, plenty effort, no income and trust that people will value quality information. I do not know where this living resume' will go in 2010, but whatever it is, I hope you will stop and consider your attitude to energy saving!