PowerSocket – On-Outlet Power Consumption Visualization

How much power does your hairdryer consume? What about your coffee machine? This is something that you could easily measure with a personal energy meter (PEM), but do you own one? And have you measured the consumption of all devices in you household?
What if we could easily see the current power consumption directly at the outlet? PowerSocket does exactly that! A lit-up ring around the outlet rotates and fades from green to red with increasing power consumption.

More information on the original PowerSocket project page

Wolfgang Kluth worked on this project as part of his Bachelor Thesis at RWTH Aachen University

• F. Heller and J. Borchers, “PowerSocket: Towards On-Outlet Power Consumption Visualization,” in CHI ’11: Extended Abstracts of the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011, p. 1981–1986.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{heller2011b,
  author = {Florian Heller and Jan Borchers},
  booktitle = {CHI '11: Extended Abstracts of the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  document_type = {inproceedings},
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1979742.1979901},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-0268-5},
  numpages = {6},
  pages = {1981--1986},
  pdf = {http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/materials/publications/heller2011b.pdf},
  project = {powersocket},
  timestamp = {20110507},
  title = {PowerSocket: Towards On-Outlet Power Consumption Visualization},
  type = {inproceedings},
  year = {2011},
  bdsk-url-1 = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1979742.1979901}}

• F. Heller and J. Borchers, “Physical prototyping of an on-outlet power-consumption display,” interactions, vol. 19, p. 14–17, 2012.
  [Bibtex]

  @article{heller2012a,
  acmid = {2065332},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  author = {Florian Heller and Jan Borchers},
  document_type = {article},
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2065327.2065332},
  issn = {1072-5520},
  issue = {1},
  journal = {interactions},
  journaltitle = {Interactions},
  major = {1},
  month = {Jan},
  numpages = {4},
  pages = {14--17},
  pdf = {http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/materials/publications/heller2012a.pdf},
  project = {powersocket},
  publisher = {ACM},
  timestamp = {20120106},
  title = {Physical prototyping of an on-outlet power-consumption display},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2065327.2065332},
  volume = {19},
  year = {2012},
  bdsk-url-1 = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2065327.2065332}}