Technology...

It’s fashionable these days to measure your carbon footprint using any number of online calculators. But most of these rely on your guesstimates about how often you travel and the cost of your energy bills. Once you know your carbon footprint, you may choose to buy offsets, but you might not know exactly how to reduce your emissions.

But new technologies will soon change how we track our impact on the planet and will allow us to instantly green our behavior. By hooking up household appliances to a domestic dashboard, we can see real-time energy use and change our patterns of consumption. Like a speedometer in the car or a scale in your bathroom, household measuring devices are the best way to maintain control over your energy consumption. Visualization can lead to big savings on energy costs, too!

The Palo-Alto based company Agile Waves has recently launched the Resource Monitor, which constantly tallies up electric, gas, and water consumption of a home or office and reports your consumption on a built-in touchscreen interface also available on the web. The device accumulates data over time, so you can compare one day to another, and judge the performance of certain appliances.

British company Onzo has also produced a device as sleek as an iPod that helps you think about when to turn your lights off, how to change your cooking methods, and how to switch your energy supplier. Onzo also has an online interface where you can compare your house’s stats with your friends’. Their beta testing has revealed that consumers can save between 6.5% and 26% on energy costs just by staying in tune with Onzo.