A Late Night Contemplation of Energy Expenditure

Late nights are a useful, often essential part of a college student’s career. There’s always that one essay that sneaks up, or that test that one isn’t prepared for, so the body’s limits are pushed yet again in the presence of the ever-growing to-do pile. Unfortunately, I have become familiar with the wee transition hours between night and day. At some point in the night, the concentration and drive breaks down and the mind wanders down all forms of rabbit trails. One such rabbit trail led me to an innovative, although not yet practicable, idea for energy usage in the home.



Green solutions for homes, buildings, and other architectural infrastructure are immensely prevalent right now; a new branch of architecture has sprung up for just such demands. This made my brainstorm for unique environmental solutions quite difficult indeed. Ideas of solar powered appliances, distributing recycling bins to coffee shops, and green roofs all went out the window with Google search: most had already been implemented. So much for original ideas, but then a thought struck me. What if everyone had an energy gauge in their homes, an interactive gauge in the living room that could tabulate how much water, gas, heat, et cetera was used each day.

Not only would the gauge calculate the consumed energy, it would equalize and minimize the amount of energy used. For instance, if water was left on in the kitchen for say, 15 minutes, the water would automatically shut off (but could be overridden by the homeowner via pressing a manual override button that would take that particular appliance off of automatic mode for a time). The same would happen with certain electronics, such as television, radio, computers, and appliances, including microwaves, stoves, and the like. In this way practically every source of energy consumption in the home could be shut off if one doesn’t pay attention to the amount of water running while brushing one’s teeth, or by forgetting to shut off the television.

I don’t know how feasible this idea is at this current moment, if at all. I am not sure if the technology for such an innovation is currently out there, or if the cost of such a machine would be within homeowners’ economic reach, I simply believe that an energy gauge that kept track of energy expenditure when the human brain is too busy with other things, would be a good idea. I’m not suggesting that energy ought to be partitioned and that everything shuts off if a house overrides the goal energy consumption for that day, which would be inconvenient and frustrating. I am simply proposing that having an innovation with the task of knowing a home’s energy consumption might improve efficiency and reduce wastefulness in homes the nation, if not the world, over.