Microsoft Kills Hohm Energy Management: Whither Energy Dashboards?

There is no demand for time travel monitoring either. But… if someone would create a product to monitor it…and leave it alone/alive… someone may have a use for it… some day.

They are killing these initiatives before anyone even knows what they are/do. The masses don’t just change a life time of energy usage/conservation behavior over night and they certainly are not lining up to monitor it yet. Some people are though. More will join them.

They treat these things like television shows. Not enough paying attention? Kill it and run another reality show in its place.

Zune.. lol Exactly.

To play Devil’s Advocate here… I would argue that “most” consumers don’t care about tracking their energy, but that doesn’t not mean all consumers do not. The failure of Google PowerMeter and MS Hohm could actually mean that energy management will continue to be a niche market that integrators will be able dominate… just like home control.

Agree, Jason. A Google or Microsoft can’t just give homeowners a bunch of data. Something has to be done with it—by an integrator or the utility or consumers themselves. Google and Microsoft only offered charts. Yawn.

Lutron RA2 and HW QS has the best promise of integrating some of what google and MS did.  Data is fine to show what’s going on but consumers don’t want to think about “energy management”, it’s this the whole point of “automation”... Thus my opinion of Lutron button controllers ability to turn “all off” or “house off” commands…. yes this comes at a price but if you want to really save dollars this is one of the right ways to do it.  Their integration of HVAC and 15 amp appliance controllers, I see the ability to soon integrate some of the fancy graph data…. it needs to just be an email bi weekly, this is what you spent last week, this way the month is projected to be, etc etc.

Bradley’s observations correlate with what I am seeing. Monthly aggregate data is useless.  Devices/homes need low cost energy tacking built into the individual loads.  Then when you get a $800 electricity bill you can go back through the details and figure out why. Accidentally leaving a bunch of lights on over a vacation can cost $100. “House off” commands are the low hanging fruit. Power monitoring does not have sufficient value to be a standalone feature.

Never even noticed Hohm existed. I monitor total AC consumption in my Homeseer / AMX home automation system. Nice charts and graphs that I rarely looked at. Until…one day an Excessive Usage trigger fired and sent me an E-mail. Bad motor start cap in the HVAC condenser. Probably saved me a compressor and certainly shortened the time it would take to notice the fault. Energy monitoring CAN be useful if you actually do somethig with the data.

The only entities who benefit from this are the utilities. They don’t want you to be able to compare billed usage vs actual usage. Xcel Energy cut off my data feed to MS-Hohm in January. Guess they don’t want scrutiny. Oh wait a minute - isn’t that what energy management IS? Scrutiny of your energy usage?

People will figure out how to use it if they have it. If they don’t have it, they can’t use it.

I saved $300 per year by shutting off 380 watts of 24x7 load that I never would have found without a real time monitor. Turn something on - see the graph jump - turn something off- see the graph fall. This is not rocket science.

But, but , but how is the left going to save the world if we don’t have these tools to be greener than a John Deere? Lol.

I use TED coupled with cinemar products for real time usage. Pretty handy. Started more a “cool” factor but over time it’s actually a money saver.

.39, sooo funny “like a tv show”. Lol. True.

Maybe the answer is a short as it is simple:
People dont want to know it because they feel that they cannot do anything with this info anyhow.
Maybe humanity came down to a point, where there needs to be a text box with “now, do you want to conserve energy after you know how much you waste” with a nearby OK & CANCEL button.
Everything else is too complicated. Is Steve Jobs guilty?

I believe consumers are becoming more aware and willing to save energy, especially when they can see how it saves them a noticeable amount money as well. However, most will not spend the time necessary to compile and analyze the data then forming an action plan.  This needs to be the function of devices themselves.

It’s “WHITHER” in this context. Unless you mean energy dashboards are withering?

Can I claim that I was trying to be clever?