Free Tendril widget: measure electricity consumption using your Mac
By Leslie Poston
If you have ever wanted to use your Mac to measure your electricity consumption and be a better and more environmentally conscious human, now you can. Tendril is a free widget you can download to your Mac that helps to make you use less energy.
Tendril is available on your Mac as a widget or on your iPhone. After a simple set up process you start getting reports on your energy usage around your home. This is useful in pinpointing exactly which appliance, computer or other electricity using device is the biggest culprit (or which group of them).
It took a few tries to get it to work on my MacBook, but once I did get it going I fell in love. It tracks my house, my appliances and devices, and my area to get an overall picture of my carbon footprint and energy usage. The widget delivers the information in an easy to read format, letting you know when there is peak activity and analyze which things might be causing the problem.
The main issue I have with Tendril is that it is manual. There is no device being sold in tandem with the free app that I could plug into my devices or my main house breaker to measure my energy use. Instead I have to turn Tendril on and manually test each appliance or device by turning it off (or on) and keeping Tendril updated.
I think if Tendril were to add a gadget that reads data from appliances and devices, even one at a time, it would be more fun, and more accurate. As it is, I’ll be removing Tendril. I’m concerned about my energy use and want to be more efficient, but time is at a premium for me - I don’t have spare minutes to mess around with Tendril’s manual interface. I hope they call me for a test drive when or if they get a gadget to compliment the application, though - it has potential.
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September 27th, 2008
Great article Leslie, but everything you are wishing for will be coming to a utility near you soon! Check out tendrilinc.com and if you have any questions email my girlfriend at mbahl@tendrilinc.com. She’s the creator of the widget, and Director of Marketing at Tendril.
September 27th, 2008
Great article Leslie, but everything you are wishing for will be coming to a utility near you soon! Check out tendrilinc.com and if you have any questions email my girlfriend at mbahl@tendrilinc.com. She’s the creator of the widget, and Director of Marketing at Tendril. Also if you would like to test a live kit, that can be easily arranged too.
September 29th, 2008
I’d love to do a live test, and then a follow up article. I’ll contact you via email.
October 10th, 2008
Can’t seem to find this as an iPhone app anywhere - looks like its available as a Mac Widget but it doesn’t turn up at all in the App Store or anywhere on the tendril website…
was it taken down for some reason?
November 15th, 2008
Well, if you’re wanting full accurate measurement of what each of your devices actually uses, live, I’m afraid you’re probably going to have to go buy a thing.
They’re not particularly expensive… e.g. the Kill-A-Watt that plugs in between a device (or a power strip) and the wall socket, reporting back instantaneous use on it’s display… and there’s other wireless devices you can get. All cost in the double figures, not too bad if you consider the potential saving they may bring.
Even my own electricity provider has got in on the act - they have sent round, “for free” (hmmm - I’m wondering at what point the likely $20+ cost is getting absorbed into my bill?) a doohickey that clamps around the mains cable running into the normal meter in the garage, somehow measuring the power flowing through it (induction can measure current as well as voltage??) and parasiting a small amount to run a transmitter to a little readout device in the house. So far however, I haven’t plugged it in as I’ve noticed it uses about SEVEN WATTS continuous for what is just a little reciever unit and an unlit, 7-segment type display, which is ludicrous (and no mention of how much the transmitter itself takes up)… I’ve managed to get my laptop down to 8.5 with the screen dimmed and everything idling, and typically it doesn’t go much over 11 if the Speedstep is kept in low gear. My CFL bedside lamp is only 5w… An energy company trying to be green really should know better than to release something as wasteful! (OK, 7w isn’t a lot overall, but considering what the thing actually does it’s massive; a kitchen-windowsill “weather station” or radio-beacon controlled clock (devices that look very similar and offer similar functionality) usually runs off a couple of AAs for a week or more, if not button cells, so the necessary power draw is at sub-watt levels.
So if apple - or some other enterprising bunch - can make a thing that works in a similar way but reports its information over standard 802.11 so I can pick it up thru my wireless router, that’d be far preferable. Let’s see if they expand this app to do so.