I’ve been tracking my energy use with the MyEnergy Dashboard for about a year now, and it’s a really easy way to parse data. You just save your username and password for your utility’s site (electricity, natural gas, or water), and each month it automatically updates on MyEnergy. Then you can browse through the information however you want. One way is a chart with usage over time. It illustrates very dramatically the drop in our gas usage when our landlord replaced the furnace.

The difference the new furnace made is impressive.

MyEnergy also lets you compare your energy usage with others who have signed up for the service in your town, with a handy dandy continuum that shades from green to red to give you visual cues. You can even set “friends” to compare yourself to. Proponents of community-based social marketing say that social norms (basically, peer pressure) are an effective way to get people to take environmentally friendly action, like saving energy, and I have to admit that I’m a little embarrassed that my gas usage in the winter is so much higher than the norm in Cambridge. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually taken action on it yet. We did a lot of weathersealing when we first moved in here, and I think the next step would be something more drastic, like convincing my landlord to do an energy audit and add more insulation. I’m working myself up to it.

Ouch.

MyEnergy was just bought by Nest. I don’t know what that means for MyEnergy (other than them pushing the thermostat on the website), but I’m hoping Nest will integrate their technology with it so you can track your energy usage even more granularly. I don’t have a Nest yet, but Massachusetts does have a $100 rebate…