When I wrote about my experience with the Kill-A-Watt, commenters alerted me to the next level in the real-time power monitoring game: gadgets that watch the whole house instead of one appliance at a time. Back then the only solutions I could find were for UK power systems, not US power systems. But recently I found The Energy Detective and ordered a TED 5000 straightaway.

The bottom line is that it works. I’ve got a real-time display showing how many watts my house is burning at any given time, along with the equivalent hourly cost. When I turn off lights or appliances that don’t need to be on, I can see the difference. There’s much more data available, but continuous instant feedback is the essential thing. It’s a powerful behavior changer.

Unfortunately my TED system isn’t yet working as well as it should. One of the components is ailing. It’s the gateway that receives data from the transmitter I put in my distribution panel, and sends it along to the wireless display and to my LAN. The gateway’s local webserver won’t respond to requests, and the gateway’s connection to the wireless display is flaky. So I’ve ordered a replacement. I hope it’ll work properly, and if it does I’ll have more to say about the software aspects of the TED. But meanwhile, this is a good time to talk about the basic hardware setup. It’s pretty straightforward, but I think the vendor, Energy Inc., explains it misleadingly. That’s a shame. I hope lots of people will be able to use this remarkable tool, and I want them to have good experiences with it. So here’s what I think Energy Inc. does wrong with its installation guide, and how I think it could be improved.

The guide says:

A technically-savvy homeowner, neighbor, friend or electrician can install TED in 10-15 minutes.

And that’s true. But there are different ways to be technically savvy. The TED is a mashup of two different technologies: electrical distribution and data networking. Each has its own set of concepts and associated terminology. An electrician may know little about data networking. A homeowner like me may know a lot about data networking but very little about electrical distribution. A map of concepts and a glossary of terms would be really helpful.

On the electrical side, the terminology includes 120/240V single-phase, A phase, B phase, two-pole breaker, and handle tie. If you’re an electrician it won’t occur to you that the terms single-phase, A phase, and B phase will confuse somebody who isn’t an electrician. Like me. If it’s a single-phase system, I wondered, how is there an A phase and a B phase? I had to consult Wikipedia’s article on split-phase electric power:

A transformer supplying a 3-wire distribution system has a single-phase input (primary) winding. The output (secondary) winding is center-tapped and the center tap connected to a grounded neutral. This 3-wire system is common in countries with a standard phase-neutral voltage of 120 V. In this case, the transformer voltage is 120 V on either side of the center tap, giving 240 V between the two live conductors, shown as V1 and V2 in Fig. 1. The two outputs are properly called “legs”, not “phases”.

Ah. Now I could see why the TED’s MTU (measuring transmitting unit) needs (I wrongly thought) to be connected to the A “phase” and the B “phase” — all the wiring in my house is divided into two “legs” and the MTU (I wrongly thought) needs to reach both of them. Here’s the recommended procedure:

Step 3.

A.) Connect the black and red wires from the MTU power cord to a spare 15, 20, or 30 amp two-pole circuit breaker.

B.) If there is no spare circuit breaker in the panel, it can be attached to any 15, 20, or 30 amp two-pole breaker in the panel. If a two-pole breaker is not available, then use an approved handle-tie to create one.

At this point, as a data-network-savvy but electrical-distribution-naive homeowner, I’m ready to call in an electrician. It’s lucky I didn’t, though, because a data-network-naive electrician would likely have missed the significance of this cryptic remark stuck in between steps A and B:

(Option: For increased signal strength, connect only the black wire.)

Huh? Oh. Now my data networking knowledge kicks in. The MTU uses power line networking. That means it sends data over electrical wiring. Where does it send data? To the gateway, a little box that plugs into an outlet somewhere and talks to the wireless display and also to a computer or, if you run a local area network, to your Ethernet router. The recommended place to plug in the gateway is an outlet near your router, so you can control it and read data from it using any computer on your LAN.

The instructions tell you to connect the MTU to both legs of your electrical distribution. In theory that enables you to plug the gateway into any outlet in the house. In practice, as you’ll find if you try, fail, and then consult the troubleshooting guide, probably not.

But now I began to see that you don’t need to do that. You could connect just one of its wires to one breaker that controls an outlet near your router. And in fact that’d be better, because power line communication can be flaky and you want to use the most direct signal path. (The outlet should preferably be near your router but not actually on a circuit that powers noisy devices like the router, or computers, or the TV. And I found one that met that requirement.)

I found confirmation for this direct approach in the troubleshooting guide:

3.7. Considering the factors affecting PLC communication, if the Gateway is still not receiving a signal, do the following:

3.7.1. Connect the black wire of the MTU to the circuit on which the Gateway is connected.

3.7.2. Remove the red wire from the circuit in which it is connected, and put a wire nut onto the red wire.

Further confirmation came from the tech support guy I spoke with when I reported the sick gateway. “Yeah, I don’t know why the manual says to use a spare two-pole breaker,” he told me. “A lot of times that doesn’t work, then people call me up and I tell them to do it the way you did.”

Documentation that spelled out the concepts and terminology in each domain, and the relationships between the domains, would help people grounded in one or the other of the domains see the whole picture.

On the data networking side, the terminology includes PLC (power line communication), Ethernet, and ZigBee. There are actually three kinds of data networking happening. The MTU talks PLC to the gateway. The gateway talks Ethernet to your computer or, if you’re running a local area network as many now do, to any computer on the LAN. And the gateway talks ZigBee to the TED handheld wireless display. All this was obvious to me, but might not be to an electrician or electrically-savvy homeowner. Spelling out concepts and terminology would help that person sort out what gets distributed where:

– Electricity to the whole house, via the two legs of the power system

– Data to the gateway, via the electrical wiring

– Data to/from a computer or router via Ethernet cable

– In a LAN situation, data to/from one or more computers via Ethernet cable and/or WiFi

– Data to the wireless display via ZigBee

Maybe a lot of this context was provided by other TED users in the support forum. Except, oops:

Several weeks ago our Forum Server crashed, and we were unable to recover the valuable library of comments that our users had posted over the prior year.

Those forum members have now learned, the hard way, to appreciate the first of the seven ways to think like the web:

1. Be the authoritative source for your own data

The Energy Inc. site goes on to say:

Our new Forum Server has built-in safeguards to prevent the loss of data should there be a hardware malfunction. We do encourage those of you who have been avid online supporters to please continue to assist those new TED users in their quest to become experts!

Sure, happy to do it, but not by posting this article to the forum. Instead I’ll invoke the second Thinking Like The Web principle:

2. Pass by reference not by value

I want this article to help new TED users. Maybe somebody in the new forum will link here. Maybe I’ll do it myself if I can be bothered to create Yet Another Account. But even if that doesn’t happen, there’s an implicit connection via search. Anybody searching for key terms in this article, along with TED 5000, will land here.

I’m glad the forum server has backup now. But I still don’t want to commit a lot of my own keystrokes to somebody else’s cloud database. I want to keep those keystrokes in a cloud database that’s accountable to me, and then link them to wherever else they need to show up.

One of the first posts I wrote with Radio UserLand, my original blogging tool, was this one from early 2002:

Messages addressed to spaces

I just realized why the idea of messages addressed to spaces hit me so hard. Email is a message addressed to a person or group, where as blogging (or posting to a newsgroup or web forum) is a message addressed to a space. A group may or may not form at the coordinates of that space. If a group does form, people may be there at roughly the same time, or may visit serially, separated by hours or days or even years. Why does this seem so special and important to me? I’m still not completely sure, I only know that it does.

Remarkably that blog post still survives at radio-weblogs.com. The New Scientist story it cited, though, was a casualty of a content management regime change. But I remember the story. It described a scenario that was futuristic then. You’re walking around in New York City with a handheld device that knows your location; you can send messages tagged with your present coordinates; you can also receive messages tagged with your present coordinates. The physical world becomes a bulletin board carved up into an infinite number of topics. Your presence in any particular place connects you to the corresponding topic. You can read messages posted to that topic by anyone who’s been there before. If you send a message to the topic, it joins the others there and becomes available to anyone who visits in the future. Of course you don’t have to be physically present to read all the messages posted to a topic. You could look up a topic by its coordinates, and read the topic’s messages from anywhere at any time.

This was a beautiful example of one of the seven ways to think like the web:

6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both a publisher and a subscriber

What the New Scientist described in 2002 may have been an early incarnation of Dodgeball, which begat Foursquare: a pub/sub network organized around a dynamic set of topics. Anyone can create a topic, post messages to a topic, and read messages posted to a topic. The game itself holds no attraction for me. I have never claimed to be the mayor of a bar or an ice cream shop, and I never will. But the pub/sub principle that Foursquare embodies is profoundly important. Wikipedia says there were six million registered Foursquare users in December 2010. I recently registered myself and was given a number just north of 8 million. I’m happy to know that something like that many people have experienced Foursquare’s mode of pub/sub networking. My hope is that as more folks see the underlying communication pattern through the lens of Foursquare, as well as through the lenses of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and other services, more will grasp the essence of the pattern and find other ways to apply it.

High on the list of other possible ways, for me, is internal corporate communication. In many companies large and small, the dominant paradigm, interpersonal messaging, fails. Sue, who is assigned to Project A, which is hosted on Site X, reaches a milestone and makes a public release. Frank, also assigned to Project A, writes public blog post P in support of the release. Time passes. Sue leaves project A, Roger joins. Also Frank leaves, and Tom joins. Roger rehosts Project A on Site Y, and makes a new release that invalidates Tom’s blog post. How can Tom (who inherited the blog from Frank) know that he needs to update it based on new work by Roger (who inherited Project A from Sue)?

He probably can’t. To understand why not, let’s start with this diagram:

The solid blue arrows are messages that flow among the four human players in this drama: Sue, Roger, Frank, and Tom. Those messages refer to four non-human players, which I’ll call topics: Project A, Blog Post P, Site X, Site Y. The next diagram shows some of those references as dotted black arrows:

Any message can mention one or more topics. If I showed all the possible references the diagram would be very cluttered, so I won’t, but just imagine black dotted lines from every message path to every topic. Do you see what’s still missing? Two critical things:

1. There are no links connecting people to topics.

2. There are no links connecting topics to other topics.

Now let’s redraw the diagram for an environment where there isn’t just person-to-person messaging, but also person-to-topic, topic-to-person, and topic-to-topic. At this point Sue has reached her Project A milestone, made a public release to Site X, and notified Frank, who has written it up as Blog Post P.

In the previous diagram I said the dotted black arrows were references. When Sue wrote to Frank to notify him that she’d reached the Project A milestone, she mentioned the name, Project A, in the subject of her email, or in the body, or both. She also mentioned the name Site X, and its associated URL. When Frank wrote back to Sue to show her Blog Post P, he mentioned its name and associated URL.

In this new diagram, though, I mean something different by the black dotted arrows. Now they are message paths. When Sue reached her project A milestone, she sent a message to a person, Frank, alerting him to that fact. That same message also went to a topic, Project A. Frank could then subscribe to the Project A topic, and find out about things that Sue, or others connected to Project A, knew but didn’t bother to tell him.

If there’s little message traffic flowing through the Project A topic, Frank won’t mind watching it. If the topic gets noisy, he can unsubscribe. But the topic still exists; people who know about it can read its messages; people who don’t know about it can find the topic and its messages by searching. It should go without saying, but this is crucial: topics must be discoverable and searchable.

Frank, meanwhile, by creating Blog Post P, has also created a new topic. Part of what happens next is already common. It’s a blog, therefore it publishes a feed to which any interested party can subscribe. Less common but still not unheard of, in the current state of play, is for the blog post to not only publish feeds (e.g., a feed of blog posts, also per-post feeds of comments) but also subscribe to feeds. So Frank might configure Blog Post P to receive a feed from Project A. When Roger reaches the next Project A milestone, he — or, preferably, his deployment software — posts a message to that effect to the Project A topic. Blog Post P, as a subscriber to the topic, will receive and can optionally republish the message.

Sue, meanwhile, by hosting her Project A release on Site X, has created (or joined) the Site X topic. When she posts the release to Site X, she links it to Project A. The link, in this case, is bidirectional. When Project A reaches a milestone, Site X is notified. And when Site X schedules downtime for an upgrade, Project A is notified.

Now let’s wind the clock forward. Frank and Sue have both left Project A. Frank no longer cares about Blog Post P, and Sue no longer cares about Project A. Roger has inherited Sue’s development role, and Tom has inherited Roger’s public relations role. At this point, however, Roger hasn’t yet reached the next milestone, and so there’s been no need for Tom to revisit Blog Post P. Here’s the picture:

This is what can’t happen in organizations that rely solely on interpersonal messaging. The system retains traces of the connections among Project A, Site X, and Blog Post P. When Roger takes over for Sue, he starts sending messages to Project A, which in turn notifies Blog Post P and Site X. When Roger moves Project A from Site X to Site Y, he redirects that link for all subscribers to the Project A topic. When Roger reaches the next Project A milestone, his message to that effect reaches anyone now subscribed to Site Y. It also reaches Tom, who subscribed to Project A when he took over from Frank.

In theory everyone talks to everyone and everything gets taken care of. In practice, as we know, not so much. Interpersonal messaging alone can’t create a resilient and discoverable web of connections. That’s why interpersonal messaging must be embedded in a pub/sub network where messages flow person-to-person, person-to-topic, topic-to-person, and topic-to-topic.

There isn’t, and never will be, a single product or service that implements this alternative architecture of communication. Many aspects of it are already available to us. You can do a lot of this stuff with internal blogging and social bookmarking, or with an email system, or with a combination of these modes, if people are thoughtful about naming conventions and if the topic archives are discoverable and searchable. But the model is abstract. To make it concrete we’ll need systems that help us use all of our existing communication tools — and all the new ones in the pipeline — to enact this pattern of communication.

In a couple of earlier entries I’ve explored how WolframAlpha can inform public discourse when it involves energy literacy. Last night, when Clemens Vasters tweeted the JAIF (Japan Atomic Industrial Forum) reactor status update, WolframAlpha again showed how helpful it can be. According to the JAIF document, the radiation dose at the border of the power station was most recently reported to be 642 microsieverts/hr. Well, what does that mean?

Q: 642 microsieverts/hr

In the US press, though, the units are typically rems or millirems. So:

Q: 642 microsieverts in millirems

That’s at the border of the power station. What about inside? According to another source, BraveNewClimate, “At 8:47AM on March 16, a radiation level of 300 milli sievert per hour was recorded between the exteriors of the secondary containment buildings of Unit 2 reactor and Unit 3 reactor of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.”

Q: 300 millisieverts

I wish I could flow all the Fukushima news through a WolframAlpha filter that would provide these and other comparisons. More importantly, I wish that the US media would flow their unhelpful coverage (/via @cgerrish) through that filter because Nuclear Boy is doing a better job than Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien.