We’ve talked before about a very cool green gadget called the Kill-O-Watt meter. Basically you plug it into your wall and plug an appliance into the meter. You leave it plugged in for a few days (or a few weeks for larger appliances) and you can find out how much energy an appliance is using. The meter can also guage how much energy you’re using overall on a daily basis – which can be super helpful if you’re trying to reduce your overall kilowatt usage on your electric bill – which means being greener and saving money!

The kill-o-watt meter is a great, and pretty inexpensive, way to really assess if you need to replace an older appliance with one that’s more energy efficient and also a great way to really understand your power consumption! After all, assessing your electric load is one of the first steps towards successfully changing your energy habits and preparing to implement any renewable.

Well, a modified version of the Kill-O-Watt meter, called the Tweet-O-Watt just won the #1 Audience Pick in the Greener Gadgets awards over at Treehugger. This modified meter actually wirelessly publishes the user’s daily energy consumption in kilowatt hours onto their Twitter account.

Created by Philip Torrone of Make Magazine and Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries, this is literally an open source hardware modification to the regular Kill-O-Watt meter – so anyone can make it at home. The guys who developed the gadget have put step by step instructions on how to recreate it out onto the web – hence the open source – in hopes of inspiring energy aces worldwide!

The idea here is that by publishing your daily kilowatt hours you become far more aware of how much electricity you are actually using – and you can watch the changes to your energy usage by changing your behaviors. You’ll be able to actually track the energy you save from taking care of ghost loads, changing out your lightbulbs or just being a better energy ace.

By tweeting your progress you can serve as a great example to the folks who follow you on Twitter and other social media sites – since you can actually have your twitter feed right into your Facebook (or other social media site) status updates. Your friends can watch your kilowatt hour usage evolve and you’ll be making them more aware just by showing them what you’re doing and informing them about how electricity is metered and used.

As energy efficiency becomes a hotter issue its education and information that becomes the most valuable commodity. People need to better understand how much power they’re using, how they’re using it and how much power they actually need in order to move forward in the process of going green.

Who knows, you could even inspire them to take steps towards reducing their own energy consumption!
So if you haven’t invested in your kilowatt meter, think seriously about getting one – and if you’re feeling really intrepid, consider using this hardware hack to inspire other to become as energy efficient as possible!