This thought occurred to me on the way to work the other day, and might be one I develop a bit further in the future.
In previous articles I wrote about how it was essential to measure one’s own home energy use during day time before going so far as to install a solar power system. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the details of your household power consumption, you really can’t make any intelligent decisions regarding solar power, and in fact, many installations completed without paying close attention to home energy use will fall a long way short of expectations.
The problem is, not everybody has time to go and stand outside the front of their smart meter each hour and record data for several weeks before they decide to install. People have lives, believe it or not, and recording the kWh currently consumed by your household each hour on the hour is not high on their list of priorities.
So, who would be good candidates to collect this data? Not the parents in the household – the children in the household. In fact, one could make a fun family project out of it.
Need to keep the kids occupied during school holidays? Give them an exercise book and send them out to take readings off the smart meter.
Of course, it may need some clever packaging to make it happen – but if kids could be convinced to collect this data on behalf of parents, it would then lend credibility to many households when making decisions about their renewable energy generation.
Not to mention it would be a great way to teach your kids valuable skills in applied mathematics!