How GreenButton helped me save 35% on my utilities bill

I love data, I do.
And if you give me some data, I am going to try to utilize it somehow.

Recently, I was driven to act upon our energy consumption habits when I started to see our family utilities bill climb up every single month. I will be honest, I didn’t care until our bill was less than 100$ month, but climbing up every month couldn’t be right. PGE couldn’t be raising my rates every day, could they?

So I did some fact finding and figures that it was all my fault (and my family’s)

So, now did I reduce my bill? Here are a simple few steps that might help you too (hopefully they do)

Advertisement

Data vs. Information

At an interview recently, I was asked “What is the difference between data and information?”.

Funny tihng is that I was reading an article on the same topic the day before and that had made me think how do I differentiate data and information.

My response to my interviewer was “To me, data becomes Information once you put some context to it“. My interviewer said “I like that” but then he also mentioned that he has heard another flavor that says “Data is RAW and Information is Processed“. I felt that maybe he didn’t like my response as much and he likes the other flavor better.

so, that makes me think this again. Is Data truly Raw and becomes information only once it has been processed?

I agree that can process the data to get information out of it, but isn’t sometimes data just enough to be utilized as Information?

also, isn’t putting context to data, in a way, processing the data?

Well, I do stand by what I said because it is after all an opinion not a theorem.