Remember back when we got our undies in a bundle over who was going to win Skidmore Unplugged? Well, we recently received an email from Christopher Sacca ’09 who helped design and code the website. This is what we learned:

The Skidmore Unplugged contest ended Nov. 22nd and it looks like Howe-Rounds remains victorious (barring any sabotage scandal). Now these nifty little monitors that they hooked up to the dorms this year are still collecting data and feeding it into the sustainability dashboard (that’s a fancy name for website), so you can check in any time and see how the dorms are doing. What those monitors do is “measure the cumulative percent increase or decrease from a baseline for each of the dorms’ energy consumption.”  For all you English majors out there that means that the site measures if the percentage of energy used has increased or decreased from an already established norm (the baseline). The baselines were established by taking the total energy usage from each individual dorm each hour and stringing it together to make a week long model, with information for every hour of every day. The point being that you use more electricity on a Wednesday afternoon than you do on Sunday at 5am. This means that any concern over the energy consumption of the Tower elevator or Health Services acting as a handicap in the competition is unfounded because their existence is already accounted for in the baseline.

At the moment the site is still accumulating data from the monitors and will continue to do so—that’s why is may seem like the contest is still going on. We aren’t sure why everyone (i.e whoever runs this contest) is being so tight lipped, but the winner will be announced at the Mr. Skidmore competition Thursday at 8pm in the Spa. Sustainable Skidmore is going to continue to collect our energy usage data, and hopefully in the future will publish it through something like these nifty interfaces for Hamilton and Oberlin.