We started out early this morning since we had our first appointment at 8am. We started driving from the NOVA office at about 7h30am since traffic is quite tense in the morning. The main plan for the day was to continue our work at Garsfontein, where we had to collect the Plugwise system from all the households and retrieve the energy consumption information.

The people from all the households received us openly and even shared their normal everyday activities and hobbies with us. One of the participants even helped our experiment by switching his geyser always on, and then later using a timer to check which method is more energy efficient. Everything went according to plan and we came back early.

An appointment was arranged with the local newspaper “Beeld” at about 12 o’clock, and so a journalist came to interview two of our team members (Robert and Andreas). We had lunch and afterwards went back to office to start preparing for Friday and handing over the project to Nova. Reports were being made and the final presentation for Friday was started.

For the afternoon, we still had one house left to collect Plugwise information, and to install Plugwise in another house where the owner was very eager to know how much energy his appliances use. One thing that we came to realise is that personal approach works best when trying to influence people about their energy consumption, and so this is an important idea to remember for the sustainability of the project.

We had dinner together and came back to NOVA to clean up the office.

Emile le Roux