Mj's dashboard

Mj replied on November 23, 2009 18:00 to the question "Broken images when printing graphs with Win7 X64." in Microsoft Hohm:

Which page are you trying to print? I'm looking at my energy report right now, and I'm running Win7 x64 (as is most of the dev team).

Mj replied on November 16, 2009 23:10 to the idea "No support for heating systems fueled by heating oil?" in Microsoft Hohm:

You're 100%, we're not displaying any of the consumption data or costs associated with fuel types other than gas and electric. This is high on the list. For what it's worth, the pie chart is including the data, but because we're talking about raw dollars it doesn't look like it. Please bear wtih us, Hohm is still in beta and we've a long way to go.

Mj replied on November 16, 2009 23:06 to the problem "Usage breakdown PieChart shows Water Heating $ but I don't pay for it." in Microsoft Hohm:

Thanks Jerry. That was my assumption, but I wanted to ask. We're talking about approaches right now that we take in the short term to at least make the numbers make some sense. Stay tuned.

Mj replied on November 16, 2009 23:03 to the idea "Enter account information once when gas and electric provided by the same energy provider." in Microsoft Hohm:

I'll add a little color to Doug's comments - we actually spent better than a month debating this and implemented it both ways. The "ask twice" approach won out for a number of reasons. I understand the frustration with having to answer what might be the same questions twice, but that's actually a rare scenario around the country.

Mj replied on November 16, 2009 23:01 to the question "How Can I upload energy data in CSV or Excel Files?" in Microsoft Hohm:

Shahid, I'm in the process of collecting usage documents from utilties around the country. Would you mind sending us a copy of yours?

Mj replied on November 16, 2009 18:14 to the problem "Usage breakdown PieChart shows Water Heating $ but I don't pay for it." in Microsoft Hohm:

Question, if you don't mind my asking, but who pays for your hot water?

Mj replied on November 16, 2009 17:59 to the problem "Usage breakdown PieChart shows Water Heating $ but I don't pay for it." in Microsoft Hohm:

Hmm... Honestly, I hadn't thought about that case. When I first wrote the calculator I was using the question "do you pay" to help determine the quantity of water you might use. It turns out that, in general, people who do not pay for their hot water tend to use slightly more water (about 36% more). So, the calculator uses that number to drive the rest of the consumption data. For some dumb reason it never crossed my mind that not paying for hot water shouldn't show up in the graph (well, it did, in the solar case, but we're not currently asking you if your hot water comes from solar and what percentage it might be). Seems painfully obvious now. I'll get a bug opened and we'll take a look at it.

If anyone else is following this thread, let me know if you pay for your hot water, and if so, if the graph does or doesn't make sense with the numbers. As you might imagine, if Hohm were to report consumption data other than energy, like water, then the calculator is doing the right thing.

Mj replied on November 06, 2009 18:34 to the problem "manually entered data won't save" in Microsoft Hohm:

Have you entered both the consumption and the cost? Does it show up when you click 'save' in the chart at the bottom of the input page?

Mj replied on October 21, 2009 23:07 to the question "Programmable thermostat for gas fireplace" in Microsoft Hohm:

I was just looking at something like this over the weekend. I didn’t find anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Most likely, each fireplace mfr. will have their own since the signals are not standardized and there really isn’t any wiring. The best I found were remotes that could either control the fire based on time on or room temperature. You might want to have a look at a high-end fireplace / spa store, or call the mfr. of your fireplace.

Mj replied on October 20, 2009 20:13 to the problem "Gas appliances showing lots of electricity use" in Microsoft Hohm:

Marty, sorry about the delay, we've been busy working on our next release and I've been heads-down with the team on some design issues.

I'm still a little confused by your statement about gas appliances showing electric usage. If you don't mind, I'd like to pull your home profile and take a look at it.

Can you send your Live Id to hohmpriv@microsoft.com and state in the email that you give us permission to look at it? I'll have a look and let you know if there's something wrong, or if I might be able to explain what you're seeing a little better.

Mj

Mj replied on October 14, 2009 17:07 to the idea "TV and Entertainment devices" in Microsoft Hohm:

This is one of my favorite topics around the office. I'd love to introduce detailed support for all of these little things. But, we already hear complaints about the number of questions we ask. Imagine adding support for coffee makers, toasters, game consoles... Once we've come up with a way that is really simple, then we'll build, launch, and announce (in that order).

Mj replied on October 14, 2009 17:05 to the question "Are you intending to bring a Hohm Thermostat to market?" in Microsoft Hohm:

Travis gave you a partial answer because that's all he can commit to right now. We will be integrating a number of devices, from a number of manufacturers. It just wouldn't make sense for MSFT to announce a product that's not ready for the market (note: Hohm wasn't announced until we were ready to turn it on... yes, we slipped a few days. We will continue to release product and then announce it instead of the other way around.)

Mj replied on October 14, 2009 17:02 to the problem "Gas appliances showing lots of electricity use" in Microsoft Hohm:

That would be me as I wrote the major appliance calculators. I want to ask a clarifying question first - are you looking at the left-hand (pie chart) graph on the home page? If so, are you connected for data feeds. The graph on the left might be misrepresenting your consumption / bill disaggregation.

I'm a little confused by your comment that gas appliances are showing electricity usage. Can you explain where you're seeing that information? I only ask because the detail-level breakdown (that is, which appliance raises up a consumption value) hasn't been released because it's not complete.

That said, two of the biggest energy consumers in your home are your HVAC system (heat and cooling) and your hot water heater. It's not suprising that the breakdown is showing high numbers for these items.

Mj replied on October 14, 2009 16:53 to the problem "No support for Seattle City Light and PSE in 98199 zip code?" in Microsoft Hohm:

I'm not sure if the SCL announcement hit the boards here, but SCL datafeeds are live. You won't get gas data yet since we're still working with PSE to finalize their data feeds.

Mj replied on October 14, 2009 16:51 to the problem "Estimated water heating costs could be more accurate" in Microsoft Hohm:

Kevin, can you describe your water heater settings to me? Capacity, etc? Whlie we're at it, can you tell me about the consumption in your home - number of people, laundry, and dishwasher usage? If you'd like you can send email to me to keep things private. Two more questions before I post this - what zip code is your home in, and are you connected to a utility data feed, doing manual data entry, or just taking the values we present?

Mj

Mj replied on July 09, 2009 22:21 to the idea "Units for gas usage should be MCF (thousand cubic feet)" in Microsoft Hohm:

To follow up on Jason's response, which is 99% correct... A therm represents the heat /energy content in the natural gas that your utility sold to you. However, they can't measure that directly at the meter, so they measure something they can - xCF. If you look at your invoice you very well might see an 'energy factor' or conversion factor from xCF to therms. The heat content changes over the course of the year primarily based on seasons.

Mj replied on July 08, 2009 18:09 to the problem "Glass panel exterior doors?" in Microsoft Hohm:

Rob's suggestion is reasonable, and it's what I needed to do. My house has fir store doors front and back (and insulated storm doors). Model as windows for now and when we update the model we'll let you know what to do.

Mj replied on July 08, 2009 18:05 to the idea "Water heater" in Microsoft Hohm:

We currently model electric and gas "tanked" water heaters. There is support for combined boiler systems as well. As I mentioned in other thread, as we learn more about the power consumption and usage characteristics of different devices we'll roll out support. I'll caveat that by saying we'll do so if it makes sense for the user base. There are some technologies that are particularly "green" but don't have wide-spread adoption (yet) so adding support for modeling them would not have the impact we'd like. However, we might make recommendations to move to those technologies.

Hope that helps.

Mj replied on July 08, 2009 18:02 to the question "Stove" in Microsoft Hohm:

You can model a range as a separate cook top and oven. The only issue you'd run into, assuming your range is quite old, is that we might double-count the pilot light costs. I'd have to verify in the code exactly what would happen.

For now think of the questions as asking about a conventional gas or electric cooktop and a conventional gas or electric oven. We don't explicitly model microwave ovens but the model does assume (for better or worse) that each home has a medium-power microwave.

As we learn more about the power consumption and usage characteristics of other devices we'll add support for those, including your induction cooktop.

Mj replied on July 08, 2009 15:50 to the question "Does this assume that all electrical devices use standby power?" in Microsoft Hohm:

I agree 100%, but like I said, we had to make a call for the beta release. This isn't the final product and won't be for many years to come (yes, we see this is a long term investment and won't just abandon the application).

I don't like the idea of hiding the information from the consumer, and to get around that we'll likely add a FAQ of some flavor that talks about the class of electronics we're assuming for this release. Once we come up with a good user input model that works across a large user base, we'll start implementing it. In the meantime we're / I'm open to suggestions about how to make this component, and others, better.