The good news is that Sam from Humm is actively working on making the Adobe Air upload application work under Linux. So, how does the process of uploading your data to the service work?

All in one

The Application is a real "one click" experience. It autodetects your SD card, sees which files are there, and sends them straight to the server after you click the button.

Here we go...

So, after waiting a few hours for the data to process - what do the graphs look like.

Monthly Electricity Usage (click for bigger)

Well, they're a little underwhelming and a bit of a mess. Now, in fairness, I've only uploaded a few weeks' of data - no doubt the graphs will be richer when I've uploaded more data. This is a beta service and it's clear that there are a lot of improvements being made.

Weekly Comparison (Click for bigger)

Annoyingly, you can't compare two different Plug Bugs - so I've no way of knowing if my computer is more energy efficient than my laptop.

There doesn't seem to be a way to go into historic data

There's no graph to show my gas usage. I've questioned the wisdom of a gas monitor - it only looks at hot water so doesn't measure cooking or hot air systems.

Overall, this is a pretty good start. I can see my hourly, weekly and monthly usage and compare how I'm doing.  It could do with some spit and polish to make the graphs more intuitive and useful.  I wonder if there's any way to get the data into Pachube or something similar.

In order to visualise the data, I have to manually upload the files to the Green Energy Options MyEnergy site.  Rather than a simple web based uploader - GEO have decided to go with Adobe Air as their platform for uploading and viewing the data.

Here are the steps I had to take to get the service working - as you will see, it wasn't easy and ultimately failed.

The site asks me to install some software in order to upload the files.  My Operating System is Ubuntu Linux - I was afraid this software would be Microsoft Windows only and I'd have to use WINE.

Let's go!

Then the site tells me I'll need to install Adobe Air.  Luckily, this can be done through the browser.

Nice and Easy?

The installation through the browser was fairly swift and painless.

Installation of Air

The installer popped up some fairly scary warning messages.  If you're going to be asking people to install your software, you need to make it as easy as possible to get.  Signing and certifying your software will reduce "error" messages like this and increase confidence in your product.  Without it, I've no way of knowing that your site isn't compromised.

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON

True to the installer's word, I ended up with an icon on my desktop.

Desktop Icon

So, I double click...

This looks hopefull...

The software has a think before popping up this helpful error message.

...DENIED!

I know what you're thinking.  "The silly sod has forgotten to plug the SD card in."  Ummm.... nope!

SD card inserted

The SD card is inserted - using the supplied reader - and my system has identified and mounted it correctly.

At this point, I'm stuck.  So I give up.

What's so frustrating is that it doesn't have to be this way.  I've no idea what the benefits are of Adobe Air - but asking your users to install something new is always problematic.  Plain old Flash - which has its fair share of problems under Linux - allows you to upload multiple files - take a look at the standard WordPress image uploader.

WordPress Multiple Select

As with everything - Keep It Simple and Stupid.  Do your users really want to install extra software for your product? Do they really need to? Is there another, simpler way which gets the same results?

I'm sure - uber-hacker that I am - that I'll figure out a way to make it work. But the point is, I shouldn't have to.

The left half of the Duet is concerned with electricity. I want to focus on the "Speed Dial" on the top and the "Daily Counter" in the middle. The units can be £, kWh or Kg of CO2 - a click on the fascia buttons switches between the three modes.

Cold Hard Cash

As you will see in the first picture, the speed dial shows how "fast" you are using electricity. The more you are using, the more the dial lights up. A perfect metaphor for usage. There's an indicator in the middle of the dial which gives you a numeric representation of your speed

In the middle of the unit is a daily counter.  This shows how much you have used since midnight.  The above image shows monetary usage, this next image shows kWh usage - the actual amount of electricity.

kWh Used

Immediately two things are obvious - kWh are more precise and simultaneously harder to understand.

Perhaps the least useful of the three modes shows Kg of CO2 released due to energy usage.

Kg of Carbon Dioxide

Given that the duet doesn't know whether my electricity is being generated by coal burning or wind turbines, it's a slightly spurious figure.

As Joe Baguley points out in his article about the Humm Trio, understanding the read-out makes it easier to understand what's going on.

I now know my dishwasher costs 16p/cycle, compared to my washing machine at 7p, and that running it on the thermonuclear remove the spot-welded lasagne from the dish mode only takes it to 17p.

Money is highly conceptual.  You can't hold a kWh in your hand and most of us have never seen a Kg of CO2 - but we can all visualise the pennies trickling from our wallets.

The problem is that the monetary graph doesn't have enough precision in it; pennies are counted - not tenths of pennies.  Switching your oven on may generate a leap from 8p an hour to 50p an hour - but switching off your lights may only drop you from 8.8p to 8.1p - a change that you won't see on the dial.

I would make the following suggestions

• Where possible include as much prescision as possible.  There's space on the readout for fractions of pennies - make use of it.
• Allow the different readings to be displayed in separate units.  For example, the Speed Dial could be in kWh while the daily total could be in £.
• The Duet allows you to set your unit cost of electricity - perhaps it should allow you to set how green your tariff is to ensure the Kg CO2 count is correct?
• It's fascinating to watch the speedo jump when the oven switches on, or drop when the TV goes off - perhaps large events should be recorded on the SD card.  Currently it only has 30 minute precision.  Given a whole day of 30 minute readings takes ~50KB of a 2GB card - I wouldn't think it unreasonable to record either twich the amount of data or only where there have been significant changes in usage.

Overall, the speedo idea is neat - you don't need to understand everything that goes on to get a quick visualisation of how much energy you are using.

As I mentioned in the unboxing - there's an integrated 2GB SD card for the Duet to record the energy usage.  As the trial progresses, I should be able to upload the data to the website for them to analyse.  They faithfully promise to send me a spreadsheet of the data if I want it.

Well, what kind of geek would I be if I didn't have a tinker with it my self :-)

I was expecting the files for each day to be rather large - they're only about 50KiB per day. So a 2GB card is good for about 40,000 days - or a little over a century. Guess I won't have to worry about making room on the card.

Each file is named with a datestamp, so my first was GEO90914.DAT.

I was sort of expecting it to be compressed, encrypted, munged and otherwise impenetrable.

It was CSV.

14/Sep/2009 20:00,GMU1   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,GMU2   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,GMU3   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,BSU    ,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,0
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU1   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU2   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU3   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU4   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU5   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU6   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,GMU1   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,GMU2   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,GMU3   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,BSU    ,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,0
14/Sep/2009 20:30,SAU1   ,00000.000,2,09.68
...

Oh happy day! I'm guessing that GMU1,2,3 refer to the "plug bugs" - the electricity sensors - not sure yet what the others are, but I'm sure I'll figure it out soon.

Having all the data in CSV makes it really easy to whack into a spreadsheet or on to a webserver to do some nice data visualisations. Good job, Humm!

However, it's a bit of a pain walking from one room to another with an SD card. It also means that my visualisations will be out of date until I manually update them. If only there were a way to automate the process...

So, I'm now looking at something like Eye-Fi. The Eye-Fi is an SD card with built in WiFi. It's supposed to be used for instantly uploading pictures from a digital camera - but I see no reason why it shouldn't be made to upload the .DAT files the duet creates.

We'll have to see...

Pairing the device was easy and the manual was very clear as to which pipes need to be monitored. A velcro strap makes it really easy to attach the wires to the pipes.

Once it's all plugged in, this is what it looks like

Clips and Cupboards

The monitor now shows whether your hot water and radiators are on.  It will show whether the water is cool, heating up or hot.  It can optionally show how long the hot water has been heating.  All very swish.

Cookin' on Gas, Baby!

There's only one slight problem with the set up - and it's our flat.  Rather than conventional hot water radiators, we have hot air.  The same boiler that heats are water has a fan which pipes hot air around out house.  We also use a gas hob to cook.

The Duet only monitors gas usage by hot water.  So I'm not sure how much use it will be for monitoring our gas usage.  In the last year, we used around 15,000kWh of gas.  Here's how our energy company recorded our usage.

Yearly Gas Usage

To really monitor gas usage, I think we'll have to go with Alistair MacDonald's ersatz suggestion - stick a webcam by the meter, upload images every hour and use OCR to figure out what the reading is.

That won't tell you what appliance is using the gas, but it will give a more accurate reading of how much gas you use per hour.

I'm already becoming quite a pain - running around turning lights off. Might need to get our boiler thoroughly serviced and our pipes and hot water tank properly insulated to make sure it's as efficient as possible.

This is a great looking unit. It has a fool proof instruction manual - however they didn't count on someone as foolish as me!

As you can see from the unboxing - this device is pretty svelte. Once on its stand and plugged in, it will nestle unobtrusively on a bookshelf.

Smaller than a paperback book

Set up is fairly straightforward.  Plug in, set the date and time, set your tariff costs, pair the device with the sensor.  That's where I came unstuck.  I was left facing the "WAITING" screen for ages.

Pairing

I tried everything. I even went to the back of the manual to find out how to reset the damn thing. I know a true geek never reads the manual but it was late and I was desperate... Then, inspiration stuck.

Take a look at the back of the unit.  There are two small black buttons.

Left button. Right Button

One of the buttons is for pairing the electricity sensor, the other is for pairing the gas sensor.  Like a fool, I'd been trying to pair the electricity sensor with the gas unit.

As anyone interested in usability knows, such things are never the fault of the user... ahem...

I was being daft, but a small label next to each button wouldn't go amiss on the next version of this device!

Once paired, I clipped the sensor around the live wire coming in to my meter. Then I plugged the sensor into the transmitter.

Near the meter

The transmitter is fairly small, so it's easy to rest it somewhere in your utility cupboard.  The sensor wire is quite long, should you not have a shelf near.  The transmitter has a range of about 30 metres according to the manual.

Both the gas and electricity sensors have multiple inputs - should you have a complicated setup such as three-phase electricity or an unusual boiler.  The Duet comes with one set of sensors for each - you can buy more if you need.

Lots of sockets

The majority of the size of the units is taken up by battery housing.  The batteries should last a year - there's a display on the Duet to tell you when they're getting low.  You can buy AC adaptors for the units if you have power sockets nearby.

Pairing the individual plug-bugs was simplicity itself.  So I've ended up with this rather fine little display.

Success!

Having done the electricity, I left the gas sensor for another day.

It's already an addictive little display.  Switching on the halogen lights in the kitchen doubles the number of kW of electricity the house uses.  Something as switching off a TV from standby is enough to make a noticeable drop.

The Duet is smarter than most other monitors I've seen.  Rather than just showing you how many kWh you've used or how much your electricity is costing, you can set a "limit" for the day.  It suggests about 10kWh per day for a small family - the speed dial then tells you whether you're over or under your daily "allowance".

Our current energy supplier allows me to crudely track my usage based on my meter readings - here it is.

Electricty Usage

I don't know whether 12kWh a day is particularly excessive.  I mean, all I've got running are a fridge/freezer, a FreeView box, a TiVo, my home server, my security camera, my DAB alarm clock, my ADSL, my WiFi router, my cordless DECT phone, my phone chargers, my...

I'm going to unplug stuff now. I may be some time...