Initial Ideas

I found with the device that I bought to measure the power usage it was kind of complicated to understand and the instructions were not very easy to follow. I decided that I didn't want mine to be too complicated to scare people.

I began with a quick brainstorm highlighting what I wanted to achieve with my interface and some quick ideas for it.

I then drew up some quick concepts. One I thought was cook was the "heartbeat" of the house. It is like those machines at the hospital which show a heartbeat with a moving line and I thought if your house is going overboard on energy use, it could be rapidly moving.
Another cool one I thought of was having something like Xbox 360's avatars and create it into a competition to use the least energy based on each person's room.
Another simple one was having a circle which expands and opens up more circles for each area of the house.