As the world gradually becomes more digital, managing your home electricity usage is becoming increasingly important. Over the past few years, the market as been flooded with devices designed to help you reign in your power consumption, but most of these require you to buy and install some kind of hardware, which has likely gotten in the way of widespread adoption.
Wattson, a mobile app that’s currently in development, aims to solve this problem by allowing you to track your energy usage without installing anything whatsoever. Instead, the application connects to your local utility provider to acquire energy usage information automatically throughout the day, and then sync it back to your phone 
periodically. Sure, this method doesn’t allow you to see your power consumption in real time like some other products do, but it comes close (hourly updates), and also doesn’t require you to purchase any sort of hardware.
Once you’ve got it synced with your electricity provider, Wattson constantly records the energy usage activities of your house, and then analyzes that information to provide you with smart statistics, usage graphs, and will even recommend products. In other words, it crunches the numbers for you and displays them in an easy-to-understand visual format, thereby helping you to make better, more informed decisions about how to reduce your energy footprint.
Additionally, to help you visualize and understand your power usage in a more intuitive way, Wattson’s SmartGraphs have the ability to switch over to different, less-conventional units of measurement. For example, at the touch of a button, you can see how much electricity you consumed last week in the range of an electric car, how many gallons of oil it would take to produce that much power, or bathtubs of water that it would take to generate that power through hydroelectricity.
Wattson isn’t yet available to consumers, but does appear to be nearly complete at this point. The app’s developers have entered it into a competition called the Energy Apps for Ontario Challenge, and will likely use any winnings it gains to help finish up development. We’ll keep you updated on how they do!