Desktop utility monitors Eskom load shedding

// April 6th, 2008 // News, Tech // 3,274 views

Those of you active on Facebook and other ‘media‘ may have seen this, but I thought I’d also share this with the regulars (hi mom!) still reading this blog.

By now we are all painfully aware of Eskom’s scheduled power cuts or load shedding and as frustrating as it is, it’s just something we’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Until we all do our bit to reduce at least 10% of our power consumption, rolling power cuts will be part of South African life.

MyEnergy.co.za - Eskom load shedding schedule monitor That being said, it also helps to be prepared for the scheduled load shedding and since Eskom‘s website is as helpful as the vehicle licensing call-centre, we have to rely on one of many websites to keep us informed.

One such website is MyEnergy, that provides a nifty (and very small) desktop monitoring utility that allows you to keep track of Eskom’s schedules for multiple locations.

This is great, as you can track the schedules for say Northriding (home) and Sandton (work) and many others from the same utility.

In addition to allowing users to monitor schedules of relevant locations, MyEnergy Monitor allows users to specify custom actions to take upon the detection of a scheduled power outage. These include a simple desktop notification, automatic computer shutdown and, for system administrators and developers, windows event log writing.

Once downloaded and installed, the MyEnergy monitor is quite simple to use and as stated above, gives you access to a couple of nice features. Thus far it’s been quite a novel and I’m interested to see what the week brings.

Keep track of updates via the MyEnergy blog or the MyEnergy Facebook group.

Happy camping…

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6 Responses to “Desktop utility monitors Eskom load shedding”

Darryn says:

2008/04/07 at 01:10

Hey Aquila

Thanks for the great writeup! Glad to hear you like what we’re doing.

We’ve been hard at work on the backend sorting out the changes implemented by Eskom (pre-emptive schedules etc) and have implemented some new features and requests received from users over the past couple weeks in the next release. We expect to put the updates out in the next couple of days.

So keep an eye on the blog (and be sure to click the ‘Check for updates’ link on the app every now and again to make sure you’re running the latest version).

Thanks again for the support.

Regards
Darryn
Aquila says:

2008/04/07 at 01:32

Absolute pleasure dude…

Keep the up the good work and the news coming – I’d love to see many people adopt this as standard.

PS: will you guys be doing a plugin for website/intranets in the foreseeable future? Would be great to incorporate something like this on a corporate intranet or something.
angel says:

2008/04/09 at 07:57

so how accurate is it?
Darryn says:

2008/04/11 at 17:20

New version is out! http://blog.myenergy.co.za/?p=16

@angel : it all depends where you are and how accurate the provided schedules are for your area. for example, here in PE, its pretty spot. Generally its pretty accurate. The app also allows users to report unexpected outages which we can use to fine tune the schedule. download it, and give it a try.
Darryn says:

2008/05/15 at 12:34

With fuel prices changing every month, it can be easy to lose track of time and forget to fill up your tank before the price goes up. Users can now setup notifications in MyEnergy Monitor to receive regular reminders days before the new fuel prices come into effect.

If the cost of fuel is an important factor in your business, or you just want to make sure youâ€™re on top of the latest changes, download the latest version now! If you are an existing user, click the â€˜Check for application updatesâ€™ link on the application, or restart the monitor. If you donâ€™t have the application yet, download it from http://www.myenergy.co.za/

Regards
Darryn
http://www.myenergy.co.za