- Posted on
Fri Mar 19, 2010 5:29 pm
-
kpfriedberg
offline
-
Jay, Berkinet,
I once again can't thank you guys enough. This really is a very powerful plugin. I've been toying around with a spreadsheet that, like emo's, is helping me to pinpoint my usage and areas where Indigo may help to improve the efficiency of my home. While it isn't ready for public consumption, it currently does the following:
1. Estimates/Forecasts each devices annual usage and cost of operation
2. Creates report that highlight the most expensive devices based on annual forecast
3. Has a chart that enables the user to select a device, the chart then shows a 'candlechart' showing the devices projected annual cost, daily high, low and average minutes on.
I'm sure I will make improvements, and will be happy to share with the community when done. However, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful (which i am surely not), the biggest 'hurdle' to making it a really easy user experience is getting the data into the spreadsheet. Even something like having the download file name simply be a mm-dd-yy.csv would greatly help things (for now i rename the file to that format, and then i have written an excel macro which allows the user to select the folder where the daily files are, it then imports all the data for all the devices for all the files in the folder).
This really is a terrific app, and with some tweaking it could actually drive sales of Indigo/Insteon (I could see a simple calculator on the website that asks the user to input number of lights, est's total wattage and then spits out potential annual savings using indigo/insteon and the break even on the installation).
Thanks again for the terrific addition to Indigo.