Well, they did it. Google killed PowerMeter.
This is lame. I mean – really, really lame. After signing up hardware partners and gathering a good number of users, google.org, “the philanthropical wing of Google” has killed PowerMeter, because, well, I guess because it wasn’t satisfying their philanthropical urges anymore?
Surely this doesn’t cost them more than a tiny fraction of their total pot of more-money-than-God. Development already stopped months (years?) ago. Why not just let it run for those who found it useful? I actually really appreciated being able to see details of my power use. It helped me make better decisions.
At least they have an exit plan to let users extract their data before they throw the big red switch. If only there were somewhere else to send it.
Powermeter wasn’t great, but it was much better than nothing. I hope something will come up to replace it. Anyone know of a good alternative?
Hi there – I’d recommend pvoutput.org which you seem to be already using. They also allow consumption feeds, it should be easy to switch from the GPM API to the pvoutput API.
Agreed, pvoutput.org does a very nice job, though the focus is obviously on production. I wonder how far they can scale for free… :)
Is the mechanism which hardware talked to Google a public API? If so it will just need someone wanting to scratch that itch. I’m surprised monitoring isn’t already a part of the various home automation systems – although they all seem to be roll-your-own at the moment.
It is a public/documented API for the hardware, yes; I have my own homegrown hardware talking to it. So someone certainly could roll something which spoke the same API, and “inherit” that user base I think.
Maybe you could finally write a Performance Co-Pilot agent and do some graphing of your own.
Heh, Jeff – When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail? ;)
There are probably a lot of things that could be done one-off and locally, but I’m starting to wonder what it would take to do something scalable in the public space and give people a reliable platform for visualizing this kind of data…
Maybe an open-source platform to do it, with a cloud-hosted instance in production, so that people without the linux admin chops could still benefit…?
I completely understand. I would probably try to use PCP as the data store. It has some nice utilities around it and it knows how to deal with the data (efficient store, rate conversion, counter wrap around, etc.). Making some sort of web front-end around it shouldn’t be too hard.
When is Google officially going to turn off PowerMeter — I, ironically, “googled” around and saw an unreliable source that Sept. 2011.
This sucks…
From the link in the main article, it’s September 16, 2011. If you go to powermeter help, at http://www.google.com/support/powermeter there are instructions for downloading your accumulated data, so that it can be transferred elsewhere, at least.
Pachube.com is welcoming powermeter refugees – http://blog.pachube.com/2011/06/how-google-powermeter-got-it-wrong-and.html – but I don’t think you can set your TED device to report directly to pachube.com. It’ll take a while for all this to sort out, I guess.