Color conveys a great deal of information to us everyday. It can even provide enough information to tell us when it pays to conserve energy.

The newspaper accounts and rumors are all true. Some utilities will actually pay you to conserve electricity and natural gas. However, you have to enroll in their Demand Response and Advanced Metering programs. But what can you do if your utility doesn't have a program or is no longer accepting people?

You can certainly contact your utility and also your State Public Utility Commission and request that they implement these programs. Also ambient color devices can help you reduce your energy consumption and also make it entertaining in the process.

Examples of Ambient Devices
Color conveys a great deal of information to us everyday. Take a minute and think about it. Although we live in a world that prides itself on quantifying everything, we still rely on color to make decisions. Color also can help us to determine the condition or state of something and take action. Here are a few examples:

Traffic lights- we know that we should stop on red and go on green. We also know that we better stop if we can on yellow, because the light is going to turn red,

A baby is very red so we think she may have a fever. If he's blue, maybe he's cold or not breathing,

Navigation Buoys- "red right return" means keep the red buoy on your right when returning to port,

Blue Screen on a Personal Computer- the blue screen of death means hat your PC has crashed,

Yellow jacket wasp- those yellow and black stripes mean stay away from me, my sting is painful,

Go to Condition Red Alert- the Star Ship Enterprise has encountered the Borg (again) and

Red flowers- to a hummingbird this means food.

Hopefully by now, you're convinced that color can transmit enough information to you to take action. In fact, we don't always need quantitative information to signal that something is happening or to take action.

We close out Part 1 of this article with a video on ambient devices. These are products that use color to send us signals about energy, weather, traffic, and the stock market. Please click this 5 minute video below. [Disclosure: we are not being paid to write this article by Ambient Devices Inc. We just think the products are cool.]

Ambient Devices Video