EarthAid is a brand new system designed to help you monitor your energy usage and encourage you to reduce it. They provide a database of energy saving tips and users who carry these out successfully will receive points for the energy that they save. This applies not just to electricity use, but both water and gas as well. The service ties in with your online account for your utility providers so will track your energy use automatically. Points can be exchanged for rewards from the partner network that EarthAid has set up. Usefully, they also provide information on the various tax incentives that are applicable. For example, if one of the actions you are considering is purchasing a new Energy Star qualified refrigerator they will link to the relevant tax rebates that you are entitled to.
Sign up is free, and the company makes clear that they intend to keep it that way. The first thing that you need to do is link your energy accounts. You can select your utility providers from a pre populated drop down menu and enter your login details. Obviously, your utility provider will need to provide online access to your bills, but from a few trials on their system it seems that the majority of providers do offer this. If your provider doesn’t allow this, I suggest you contact them because the sooner we can escape the black box of energy billing, the better. If you successfully link your energy bills then your data will be fed into EarthAid and you can monitor your energy usage, similarly to Google PowerMeter.
