A 16TH-CENTURY cottage on the Isle of Wight has been reinvented for the 21st century by sending its own messages on the Twitter social networking system.
Despite its thatched roof, it sports many things to please gadget enthusiasts such as sensors to control temperature, lights and even the heated bathroom towel rail.
The whole idea of this “smart” house arose because of efforts to cut electricity consumption, explained owner Dr Andy Stanford-Clark, who described the cottage’s hidden special features, including the ability to receive a text message to switch on the reindeer Christmas lights in the front garden.
An engineer and inventor working with IBM, he addressed a session at the British Science Association’s Festival of Science yesterday on the subject: The house that twitters.
The house boasts about 700 Twitter “followers” who get regular updates about how hot the greenhouse is, or whether a door or window has been left open.
Then there are the notices every time the occupants consume another 100 litres of water, or the tweets that tell followers another fiver’s worth of electricity has been used up.
Hoping to save money by using less electricity, Dr Stanford-Clark began to install wireless sensors on windows and doors, and others on light switches and heating systems.
As his project grew he installed devices to monitor electricity and water consumption and built electronic mouse traps to catch unwanted guests should they appear.
All these were overseen by a small computer, which could receive messages sent from his mobile phone to enact orders to turn on the water fountain or switch off the livingroom lights or television. “You can save yourself £5 a night if you turn things off,” he said. “In theory, I could control anything in the house.”
He built more intelligence into the cottage, for example having the study send him a greeting on his arrival, provided, of course, his Bluetooth phone was on.
At this stage the electricity savings were building up. “I have reduced it [consumption] by about a third,” he declared. “The system basically paid for itself in less than a year.”
What better way to proceed then but to put the house itself online by having sensors send out Twitter announcements to the wider world.
This social networking system allows short 140-character messages to be sent by computer or mobile, and those so inclined can declare themselves as “followers”, receiving these notices as a way to keep up with the sender. Celebrities attract thousands of followers, but the house managed about 700, more, Dr Stanford-Clark points out ruefully, than he managed to attract himself.
