This year’s Greener Gadgets Competition ended on February 27 where tons of awesome green gadgets were judged. The big winner this time was the Tweet-a-Watt, a modified Kill-a-Watt that tweets your daily power usage. A Kill-a-Watt is a great product that has been out for quite a while and tells you how much power you are pulling from a particular outlet. This is great to use if you want to find out how much power your devices are using while powered on or even while they are supposedly powered off. The Tweet-a-Watt goes step further and automates the process of taking this information, transmitting it wirelessly, and getting it online for you to monitor. Their modifications of the Kill-a-Watt are open source and free for anyone to use and modify. If you head over to the Tweet-a-Watt’s twitter page you can see how it works and how they track their power usage over time.

Here is more about how the Tweet-a-Watt works from the Green Gadgets Competition page.

Using “off-the-shelf hardware”, we have modified a Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter to “tweet” (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user’s Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours). We are releasing this project as an “Open source hardware” project – in other words, anyone can make these, modify them and make a commercial product from the ideas and methods.

Here’s how it works: The modified Kill-a-Watt uses a “super-cap” to slowly recharge itself. Once there is enough power it turns on the Xbee wireless module which transmits the data to a nearby computer (or internet connected microcontroller, like an Arduino). Once the power usage for the day is recorded it uses a predefined Twitter account (it can be your own) to publish your daily KWH consumption for the day. Multiple units can be used for an entire household.

I’d highly recommend heading over to the Greener Gadgets Competition home page and checking out all the other cool gadgets that were in the competition.

Admittedly, we have never gotten the hang of composting. We tend to put our food waste in a crazy heap at the back of the yard that we occasionally shovel around, water, and throw more stuff on. Needless to say, not much composting occurs there. We haven’t taken the time to learn how to do it but figure at least it is slowly breaking down in our yard instead of taking up unnecessary room in a landfill and eventually it will be something our soil can use and in the mean time its something our neighborhood of bugs can munch on.

Nature Mill knows there are good intentioned folks like us out there that want to compost but like us haven’t got the hang of it. More likely for most people, they may not have time or room to do it properly or have the misconception that it will be stinky. Forgive me for sounding like an infomercial but I stumbled across their product and am so impressed! Granted, with the economy the way it is now, we can learn how to do it the good, old fashioned way but this is very tempting and for some folks it will be the only way to go. They have created a neat gizmo that takes up to 80 pounds of plant food-scraps per month and turns it into happy, healthy compost ready to nourish your garden by controlling temperature and oxygen levels for optimum decomposition. It runs on very little energy and compost is garden-ready in two weeks. Using compost helps keep your garden healthy, nourishing plants and deterring pests and disease. It is tremendously better than fertilizers and weed killers, that are detrimental to long term soil health and are made from petroleum byproducts.. not exactly a green solution for your homegrown greens! This machine seems like an easy way to get great compost with no questions about what mystery ingredients may be in it. Neat!

This compact device called the YoGen Max from a company called Easy Energy allows you to charge up your laptop anywhere in the world with the power of your foot. If you are at an airport with no outlets in sight or on a plane and you don’t mind looking a bit silly and getting weird looks this could be perfect for you. More importantly this can keep your laptop going in rural parts of the world where you won’t look silly at all foot pumping your laptop.

Folded up it is small enough to fit into most laptop cases and easily go with you anywhere. The YoGen Max produces 60-80 watts of power when in operation and when your foot and leg cramp up  it can also hold 12 rechargeable AA batteries to keep the power flowing. Easy Energy claims this is enough to keep a typical laptop going.

This isn’t for sale quite yet, but they say they have a working protype and are starting to take orders from distributors. I also don’t see any information about how much this retail for, but hopefully it will be reasonably affordable. This portable charger could help many people that need power on the go.

For more information head over to Easy Energy’s site.

Here’s a video demonstration of the YoGen Max.