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For those of you who haven’t come across Current Cost before, they are a British company who produce home energy monitors. The aim of these real time monitors is to help people cut their waste energy and therefore reduce their energy bills.

What makes the monitors particularly exciting is, as well as the built in display, they also contain a data port that can be used to transfer bursts of energy usage data, every six seconds, directly to a computer, leading to world of endless possibilities. Exploring these possibilities is the reason I have just ordered a Current Cost CC128 also know as the Envi.

A quick search on Google brings up a number of different people who are already experimenting with energy monitoring devices. The majority of these people seem to be techies at heart and are doing some amazing projects with them, however…

Although the techie side of me will be pleased to have another gadget to play with, my main aim is take a slightly different view point and look at the possibilities from a designer’s point of view.

How can the data from these monitors be made more usable, accessible and appealing to the everyday person, the non-techies of this world?

I have a few ideas up my sleeve, check back soon as my ideas begin to come to life…