Thoughts from a serf

I have solar on my barns roof. I am a micro energy producer. So naturally I'm interested in knowing about how much money and energy I save or how much I don't save any given day or month.

This perspective is not available to me without me taking the data I do have and perform calculations on it. My project is therefore very simple. I want a web app that performs the calculations for me and present it in a decent dashboard format for me.

And to make it a bit more challenging, since the above is quite easy to do if I settle for a cron-job doing the fetching and calculations for me and then just report it to me, I will do this web app as a software as a service.

So the gist of the app is to import data from energy producing systems, pare that with energy prices, other incentives and deductibles and as much data as possible really, and create a central birds eye view of everything about your energy consumption and production.

I'm not sure I will cope and actually do this, but I have this day dream of having a side hustle that is serious enough to make it possible to focus on. I want to trick my brain into focusing on this and some times I have to imagine some audience or receiver to achieve this.

I will not add more about this project before I had more time to outline it for my self, but I have decided on a few things.

It will be built in Ruby with Ruby on Rails and the app will target a European audience. Meaning that all the input (costs, incentives and so on) are from EU sources. So the app will focus on the EU-based micro energy producers.

I genuinely think this could be a viable product that I can charge for if I get it up and running. This is because most resellers of solar energy systems are creating their own ecosystems and they are generally bad at putting useful data in front of their users. And another important factor, if you change the energy reseller historic data will be lost in time. If there were a central solution with an open format data export feature, like the one I want to build, a user is able to opt out at any time and still be able to retain their data.

This post is a way for me to kick me in the butt to stop thinking about making this and start doing it.

Joakim Durehed