Got 5 minutes to spare? Please take my survey...

I did the survey but to be honest it's a bit rubbish for a university level project, and makes assumptions. I don't actually want an app or emails warning me about electricity use - but there isn't an option for couldn't care.

My gas and electricity bill are huge - but modern living simply uses electricity. I work from home - and have 10 monitors, 6 computers and racks of electronics all on 24/7, and their contribution to the electricity consumption is nowhere near what people make it out to be. I have a meter telling me how much power is being used, and it runs around 1-2KW minimum on the display, all the time. My electricity bill for the quarter Sept to Dec was £297, my gas bill £320 - this mainly because the washing machine is in heavy use with four people getting dirty all the time, so the amount of clothes we wash is pretty high. We don't use the dishwasher - this is our cost saving process. Working from home also means lights on in multiple rooms - which use far more than the tiny amount saved by putting things on standby.

I don't like £1200 a year for electricity, but faffing around with an app won't help me at all - working in the dark, with the heating off, in dirty clothes would save me plenty. I really don't care about the environment from this point of view - I'd be happy with nuclear power (what we buy from the French because we don't have enough of our own).

Living is expensive. Do I plug in the 1K Fresnel lights I have plenty of for video - or spend a few thousand replacing them with LED? I'll keep using the old ones at around 12p an hour. Unit cost for electricity is really not that expensive, I just use too much. My TV could be on all day for pennies, yet a couple of washing machine cycles might cost me real money. The time taken to go around turning things off I just can't be bothered with. The media has convinced people TVs and computer monitors are heavy users of power - they simply are not!
 
I did the survey but to be honest it's a bit rubbish for a university level project, and makes assumptions. I don't actually want an app or emails warning me about electricity use - but there isn't an option for couldn't care.

My gas and electricity bill are huge - but modern living simply uses electricity. I work from home - and have 10 monitors, 6 computers and racks of electronics all on 24/7, and their contribution to the electricity consumption is nowhere near what people make it out to be. I have a meter telling me how much power is being used, and it runs around 1-2KW minimum on the display, all the time. My electricity bill for the quarter Sept to Dec was £297, my gas bill £320 - this mainly because the washing machine is in heavy use with four people getting dirty all the time, so the amount of clothes we wash is pretty high. We don't use the dishwasher - this is our cost saving process. Working from home also means lights on in multiple rooms - which use far more than the tiny amount saved by putting things on standby.

I don't like £1200 a year for electricity, but faffing around with an app won't help me at all - working in the dark, with the heating off, in dirty clothes would save me plenty. I really don't care about the environment from this point of view - I'd be happy with nuclear power (what we buy from the French because we don't have enough of our own).

Living is expensive. Do I plug in the 1K Fresnel lights I have plenty of for video - or spend a few thousand replacing them with LED? I'll keep using the old ones at around 12p an hour. Unit cost for electricity is really not that expensive, I just use too much. My TV could be on all day for pennies, yet a couple of washing machine cycles might cost me real money. The time taken to go around turning things off I just can't be bothered with. The media has convinced people TVs and computer monitors are heavy users of power - they simply are not!

The whole project is around designing an app for such a thing. It's about user design, the subject doesn't matter. You can leave all tick boxes blank if you don't want any - maybe we need to make that clearer.

Thanks for the feedback.
 
This caught my eye....

"the members of Group 2 (Jieyu Zhang, Junchi Yan, Libo Cai, Abhinav Mehrotra and Matt Smith)"

WTF kind of terrorist organization is this? North Koreans, Taliban, and and one of them using the most generic Anglo-western alias there ever was? Very suspicious! But I took your survey anyway. Good luck!
 
This caught my eye....

"the members of Group 2 (Jieyu Zhang, Junchi Yan, Libo Cai, Abhinav Mehrotra and Matt Smith)"

WTF kind of terrorist organization is this? North Koreans, Taliban, and and one of them using the most generic Anglo-western alias there ever was? Very suspicious! But I took your survey anyway. Good luck!

Thanks man. I'm the Matt. 3 are Chinese and the other is Indian. We're going to take over the world by convincing you to reduce your electricity consumption.
 
I completed it too, but I'm another one who doesn't want an ap to tell me to turn out a light. You might also think that people in other places than the UK have different opinions on energy conservation than might help your project - there was nothing about the responder's location.

i saw an ad for a new thermostat with ap the other day - 'tracks your habits, blaa blaa...' - really? I have a programmable thermostat, set to turn heat up when we're home/awake, etc (4 set points per weekday, 2 per weekend day). Occasionally, we'll kick it up manually a degree or two. I need a $250 thermostat and ap for that?
 
The problem I really have is when students decide a product or process is necessary and important and then attempt to justify it with research. The reality that some have touched on is that we KNOW electricity is expensive, but knowing how you use it, and how much it costs doesn't prevent it, in the way that covering cigarette packets with horrible pictures, warning labels and even telling you you will die doesn't stop people smoking. The only way to reduce electricity consumption is to remove our current lifestyle and replace it with a worse one. That's just a non-starter.
 
We don't decide the subject, that's set by the course teachers. This is an exercise in user-centred design. We won't be making an actual product, just designing an interface.

Thanks for all the responses so far - very much appreciated!
 
Took it.

So are you into app development?

Thanks! I'm a software engineering masters student (and quite an old one, at that). This is for a user-centred design module. I start a mobile/Android development module in the coming term, which should be pretty cool.
 
The problem I really have is when students decide a product or process is necessary and important and then attempt to justify it with research. The reality that some have touched on is that we KNOW electricity is expensive, but knowing how you use it, and how much it costs doesn't prevent it, in the way that covering cigarette packets with horrible pictures, warning labels and even telling you you will die doesn't stop people smoking. The only way to reduce electricity consumption is to remove our current lifestyle and replace it with a worse one. That's just a non-starter.

Goddamit it's just a school assignment. Take the fucking survey, help him out, and STFU about it.
 
Goddamit it's just a school assignment. Take the fucking survey, help him out, and STFU about it.

Amen. Johnny is a nice guy and has an interesting project. Hook him up. What a grumpy and contrary bunch musicians can be. Also not typically known for their financial acumen....
 
Amen. Johnny is a nice guy and has an interesting project. Hook him up. What a grumpy and contrary bunch musicians can be. Also not typically known for their financial acumen....

Calling some of these fuckers "musicians" is being a little generous.
 
Done. I wish I could go solar but a 300 year old tree shades my whole house. Can't get satellite TV/internet etc either.
 
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