Wattch by Team Claude Give Us a Team Name

Inspiration

A projector in LT19 pulls 210 watts. The lecture ends, someone hits the power button once, and it drops to about 9 watts of phantom energy consumption until morning.

Nine watts sounds like nothing. That's exactly why it survives. It's small enough that no individual feels responsible for it, and large enough that, multiplied across every projector, printer, monitor and AV rack on campus, it runs all night, every night, in empty rooms.

We kept coming back to one observation: the waste on campus isn't consumption, it's abandonment. Nobody is being wasteful. The job just doesn't get finished.

And the usual ways of trying to fix this all run into the same problems:

Awareness campaigns ask people to care about something abstract. But a poster about kilowatt-hours isn’t going to change much if everyone forgets about it the moment they leave the lecture theatre.
Dashboards show facilities teams where energy is being wasted, but they don’t actually give them a way to fix it. Nobody from facilities staff is going to be in LT19 at 11pm checking whether the projector is still on.
Self-reported pledges measure what people say they’ll do, not what they actually do. There’s no way to verify them, so they don’t tell you much.

The last person in the room has no reason to care. But they do now. Because they could win new AirPods Pro if they do.

What it does

WATTCH turns standby power into a fantasy draft game with real stakes.

You adopt a real appliance: the LT19 projector, the COM1 print room printer. Each person carries a score that starts at 100 and only goes down. You are protecting a score, not accumulating one, because people work considerably harder to avoid losing what they have.

When a device drops into standby you get one job: go and actually switch it off.

An important note, however, is that using a device does not affect your score. We are not asking anyone to work in the dark or print less. We are asking them to finish switching off what they already finished using.

Devices left idling overnight go at-risk, meaning anyone else on campus can adopt them out from under you. Private leagues of people who already know each other create the social pressure; an institutional-wide league with real prizes creates the reason to climb.

What allows us to see when a device is on standby? The Volta Architecture: Electronics plugged into EcoVolt's IoT smart plugs. The hardware streams real-time consumption data up to Ecovolt’s AI-Native Cloud BMS dashboard.

How we built it

Vite + React 19 + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS v4. Single page, tab navigation in React state, no router, no backend, no network calls. All seed data lives in src/data/ and every piece of demo logic lives in src/demo/.