WattzOn Connects You With the Real Story of Your Stuff

WattzOn is a website that allows users to calculate their energy consumption, tracking just what kind of an impact you're making. Rather than having a carbon footprint, though, you see your impact in terms of energy consumption, or watts. From your electricity use, to your transportation methods, to the products you buy, WattzOn helps tally your energy footprint and tells you how much energy your lifestyle requires. Simply create a profile, add in your activities and select what products you own, and it calculates how much energy you're really consuming. But wait...how do we calculate the energy of the products we buy?

That's where one of WattzOn's biggest features - and perhaps most ambitious - gets started. It's the Embodied Energy Database, or EED.

With the EED, WattzOn hopes to calculate and track the embodied energy in our consumer products, from foods to clothing to electronics and everything in between. To do this, the site is relying on us. The information on the site is all crowd sourced, putting the calculations and the final tallies in our hands.

Know Your Energy Use? Take This Quiz

Crowd sourcing means getting the users to generate the content. WattzOn users can help each other figure out how much energy goes into making a product like a cell phone, including how much energy goes into the materials that it is comprised of and the transportation it takes to get the product from manufacturer to consumer. When all of the different data is pulled together, we are left with the embodied energy of that cell phone. But it is up to the users to discover and input that information so that we can all have the answer.

So, how do we take part in gathering up and providing this information? I'll show you - but first, let's address an important question:

What's Embodied Energy?

Embodied energy is the amount of energy it takes to manufacture and distribute a product. The energy used to create it is therefore "embodied" in that item. For example, about 50% of the amount of energy a laptop consumes during its lifetime is consumed during manufacturing as the energy required to mine raw materials, process them, assemble the products from the various parts, package them, ship them to distributors and so on. Only a portion of its energy consumption comes from what it draws when you plug it into the wall.

That means we need to seriously consider the embodied energy of our products and take a closer look at how much they consume before they even get to our homes. That's where WattzOn's EDD database comes into play

Check out what it's like to input a new product, and find out more about what this tool reveals about the stuff we buy.