Twitterplug experiment - the morning after

You may remember than a couple of weeks ago we announced our Twitterplug experiment at an event where Lord Puttnam and Green Thing spoke about using Creativity Vs. Climate Change.

The idea was to hook up a laptop to a Current Cost energy meter to a Twitter feed and tweet the evening's energy output live in a combination of automated machine-data and spontaneous human-commentary.

If you fancy giving it a go then Red put together this small but perfectly formed 'How To' pres on how to do it yourself:

So how did it go?

Well the evening was a great success. David Puttnam - who is an extraordinarily lovely gent btw - spoke eloquently and passionately and convincingly about climate change and the power of persuasion to get people to do the right thing. And in such illustrious company Green Thing didn't do too badly on the same subject either, if we do say so ourselves ;-)

The Twitterplug tech worked a treat, and the combination of machine + human tweets was interesting I think and helped explain the connection between activities and energy consumption. For instance:

• Twitterplug reading 185.0 watts


• Lights down, Lord P. is on - We're getting challenged: education or catastrophe


• Twitterplug reading 462.0 watts


• Someone puts the kettle on. We must hunt it down and destroy it.

On reflection though I think sparser tweets might have worked better, or perhaps setting up a separate twitter account for the machine feed, and then referencing that in the live commentary. And we could've made the connection between energy usage and CO2 output live.

I also made the mistake of forgetting to turn off the tool that automatically updates my Facebook status from the @dothegreenthing twitter account which meant people left me notes wondering if I was drunk, spam-crazed or hoping I'd pass the kool aid ;-)

All in all, it was a v. useful way of exploring creative ways to visualise data about the environment. Lots more we can do here I'm sure. If anyone has any ideas, please let us know!

in total then, the event used an average of 198.52 watts/hr which created a total of 0.261 kgs CO2, which is how much a radio would make if it was left on playing the Vangelis theme music from Chariots of Fire for over 32 and a half hours. Although I'd like to think this event was a bit more inspiring and a better use of electricity than that.

PS. Looking at the image above I wonder if Puttnam and Vangelis are in fact the same person?

PPS. If you're interested in how we did our calcs,  here's how...

• The average energy reading over 25 tweets was 198.52 watts per hour.


• We  multiplied that by 2.5 hours, the length of the event, and divided it by 1000 to give a kwh number - 0.4963.


• In the Green Thing Wiki we had used a calculation from AMEE ("The World's Energy Meter") that 1kWh of electricity produces 0.527kg of CO2, so 0.4963 kwh x 0.527 = 0.261 kgs CO2.


• On a different Green Thing Wiki page we'd already researched that the average radio emits 0.008 kg CO2 (or 8 grams) per hour.


• Hey presto, you get 0.261 kgs CO2 from 32.625 hours of radio play (probably the same whether it's playing Vangelis or LCD Sound System, but only one of them wrote the theme music for a David Puttnam film).

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