Who Else Wants a House that Tweets?

A computer engineer from the U.K. has wired up his family home with sensors that send messages to Twitter, which he then receives alerts for on his cellphone. Yes, the house tweets.

Andy Stanford-Clark, 43, has a historic Elizabethan cottage in a secluded area of the Isle of Wight and was worried about how to monitor the home while he wasn’t there. To solve the problem, he wired up sensors in and around the home which detect when certain things happen, like a window is left open, the heat comes on, an alarm goes off, etc. and send updates to a dedicated Twitter account, where the tweets are then sent to his mobile phone. The house also has sensors hooked up to essential services like water meter, power meter, etc.

Andy’s entire family are monitoring the Twitter account and since it’s been set up, it’s had some unexpected benefits – like at one time the home began using far too much water which was detected and sent to Twitter. Andy’s wife noticed the tweet and immediately discovered that an outside garden hose had broken. The family has also saved a substantial amount of money on their electricity bill since the house tweets when another £10 of power is used, making them more aware of power usage.

“Mr Stanford-Clark believes the technology for anyone to put their home on Twitter will be available in an affordable form in two to three years.

It is the start of an internet of things’, he said. ‘It’s a world where little devides, thousands, millions, trillions even, will be connected to the internet.

They will each be telling us about one little piece of data they know about and by mining that sea of data we can know more about the world we’re in.”

The Twitter account is @andy_house but it’s been set to private for obvious reasons.

[Source & Photo: DailyMail.co.uk]