I have an ongoing energy monitoring project -- I'm archiving meter consumption data for a couple of clients, and would like to make it more usable. I'm currently in the process of evaluating visualization front-ends.
Energy Star Portfolio Manager
Provides a REST api, and no other way to bulk upload data. The only way to upload CSV data is to paste it into a preformatted excel spreadsheet.
Does not provide any useful visualization with anything finer grained than monthly billing data.
It may be useful to upload monthly electricity, gas, and water data if I have it all in one place. If I can find a simple example, I'll take a crack at it.
This project has a lot of promise. It consists of some hardware for sale, pre-configured to talk to the project's open-source PHP server software. You have your choice of hosting the data on your own server (which has some hiccups), or for no charge on the project's server (which didn't immediately work for me).
My server
I was able to get the software installed and my data imported on my linux workstation with a minimum of fuss. Some of the features didn't immediately work because redis.so and dio.so aren't installed by default and have no ubuntu packages. Pretty simple -- `sudo pecl install dio-beta` worked just fine.
Project Server
Unfortunately, the same upload tools would not work to upload to the project server (the uploads failed silently with a success message!), and none of the live examples from the project website are currently working.
Conclusions
Most of the project's energy seems to be (understandably) going into making their for-profit products work with the software, so there isn't a lot of effort left over to fully document the API for edge-cases like my own. Asking on the (very active) community forum returned suggestions that the system was not designed for displaying historical data. I belive that, so I'll be looking elsewhere.
The great-granddaddy of data visualization, this comes down to rolling my own data visualization website using some pretty awesome tools. Ultimately, I'm not a front-end guy, so making this into something that can be customer-facing will take a lot more work than I want to invest.
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