Two Western seniors in the electronics engineering department are building an energy monitoring system that will measure energy use on a floor-by-floor basis in buildings on campus and send the data to a student-accessible Web site.

The goal of the system is for students to see how much energy they're using compared to students on other floors, said designers David Hay and Sebastian Scheiff. Scheiff said he hopes the system will educate students about changing energy-wasting practices. The system will first be installed as a demonstration in the electronics engineering laboratory and if successful, may be installed in other buildings around campus.

Seth Vidana, coordinator for the Western Office of Sustainability, approached the electronics engineering department with a proposal to design the system for campus use. Hay and Scheiff were interested and dropped their original senior projects to work on the system as a team.

Oberlin College in Ohio has a system like this, Scheiff said, but to install one like it could cost more than $50,000, so the team is working to design a similar but less expensive model.

Hay said Oberlin College is the most environmentally friendly university in the nation and has alternative sources of power for school use.

"They actually create more power than they use, so the power company ends up paying them money, which is something Western would like to do eventually," Hay said, "But that's a long way off." Installation of the system in buildings around campus is a step towards less energy waste, he said.

"Most of the energy that can be saved is consumed because of the wasteful habits of individual people," Scheiff said. "I think with the current energy crisis, the most simple and easiest thing to do is to cut down on energy consumption."

The system will be installed in electrical panels that power each floor. It will measure energy use and chart on a Web site how much energy is used on different days and at different times of the day. Either Western's Web site or the engineering Web site will host the data.

The project should be completed by the end of spring quarter, said Todd Morton, program coordinator for electronics engineering technology, but seniors in the program do not always finish them on time.

"That doesn't mean that they fail," he said, "It means that maybe the project turned out to be more complex than they had originally planned."