By Brittany Levine, Los Angeles Times
Glendale Water & Power has a new way to get residents involved in the city’s so-called smart meters: a digital frame that shows exactly how much it costs to run the air conditioning, the microwave oven and other appliances.
The new project is the brainchild of a Burbank businessman, Glendale Water & Power and Ceiva, a digital frame maker. It displays electricity and water usage on a small frame to get people to engage with the smart-grid technology the city has spent $20 million to install, the Glendale News-Press reported.
Jim Sepe, Ceiva’s chief technology officer, is one of the guinea pigs. He can turn up the air conditioner, set the Jacuzzi at a lower temperature and run the microwave to watch numbers tick up and down on a digital photo frame he keeps on his kitchen counter.
“It’s really fun,” Sepe said. “I learned that if I did this or that, or turned my Jacuzzi down a few degrees, I was saving money.”
Amid a slide show of Sepe’s family photos, a screen shows up notifying him that he’s spending 13 cents an hour on electricity and that he’s used 640 gallons of water so far this month. When he flips on the air conditioner, the electricity cost shoots up to 94 cents an hour.
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