“This night Pelle couldn’t sleep, so I went to his room and found him watching wattson. Even if Pelle only is 7 years old, he could see a connection between the “Earth hour” he had heard about on the news, and the numbers and colors on wattson. He just said he wanted wattson to change color to blue before he could sleep… “
wattson has definitely made us think about our energy consumption. We are fairly ‘green’ already, but there’s always room for improvement and i’m certain wattson will help us squeeze more out of our energy and annual expenditure. It is certainly educating us as to which appliances use the most energy.
Undoubtedly the best thing about wattson for us is the mac connectivity. We got holmes up and running perfectly under mac osx 10.5 leopard straight away. It’s becoming very interesting because after living with wattson for a week, we’ve noticed the data is becoming a lot more meaningful per day.
We also have an ‘owl’ meter, which is good as far as it goes, but having access to the data in the form of charts and graphs takes everything to a whole new level completely. We tend to take the ‘owl’ meter around the house, whilst wattson stays pride of place in the lounge and is always there when we want to see what’s happening, rather than ‘remembering that we’ve left him upstairs’ or something. :) We’re very attached to wattson.
Overall, the quality of wattson is inspiring. The whole thing feels very ‘British’ somehow. Real personality! If it was made in the mid-1970s it would definitely have the distinctive monochrome ‘selected for the design centre, London’ sticker on the box. That’s the only thing that seems missing somehow. :)
Shortly after getting it we uncovered a fault with a pump which serves a well in the garden – it had become faulty and was constantly on making for extremely high electricity bills.
We also stay in quite a large house so it is useful to look at Wattson before going out to make sure the children haven’t left anything on – I think after a while you get to know what a ‘normal’ reading is for a particular time of the day.
My husband is a bit of a gadget man, and wattson was bought as a gift for him but the whole family find it interesting and it makes the children aware of using electricity, both from a cost and environmental point of view.
Yes, we are very pleased with it indeed!