AlertMe started life as a safety and security company, providing their on-line wireless alarm system. now it’s clear from the very front page of their site that they are focussing their future on energy monitoring.
They’ve employed their Zigbee technology, already refined in their safety and security product, to create their newest providing – AlertMe energy – a £49 hardware package along with a subscription to a monitoring service. So, does it live up to the guarantee and can you really save money using the system….?
Install – the set-up process is the typical well thought out, guided affair that we’ve come to know and love from AlertMe. From the moment we took the lid off the box until we first saw our energy usage on-line took around 30 minutes, (perhaps 15 minutes of that was waiting for the hub to discover the clamp transmitter and for firmware updates). The hub plugs in to the mains and your Ethernet network. The hub itself consumed just 2.5 watts in our test, unlike a lot of other on-line set-ups that require either a thirsty PC to be powered up, or a complex setup requiring a Linux Slug to offer the interface to the Net.
The AlertMe energy package – Click image for full size Version
We plugged ours directly into our switch in Node Zero (there’s no Wi-Fi built in). The hub receives the data from the clamp transmitter that you fit at your meter box. It’s powered by two D cells, included in the kit, which according to AlertMe ought to last for around 2 years. The lights on top of the hub change colour as your consumption climbs. For this reason it maybe beneficial to place it somewhere much more conspicuous than we have. possibly you would notice the red glow signalling you’d left something on as you were leaving the house for example.
The AlertMe energy ‘Hub’
The AlertMe energy ‘Clamp’ Installed
As everything is done through the AlertMe servers there’s no software to install. everything happens in a browser so the system is completely OS agnostic. once into the web interface it’s just a few extra clicks to enable the link to the Google Powermeter system. AlertMe are Google’s first UK Powermeter partners and with this in place your energy data is sent every 15 minutes and appears on the widget in your iGoogle page. It’s best there on your home page without even having to log into your AlertMe account. Google will also send you weekly emails summarising your energy consumption and you can share your Google data with friends and family too.
Google Powermeter Widgets & weekly email – Click images for full size version
You have to remember to enter the unit cost for your electrical power (currently £0.153 per KwH in our region) and currency so the costings are appropriate (you need to do this separately in the Google powermeter settings too).
Data – who doesn’t love a good graph? It’s a great way to see your usage pattern at a glance and the AlertMe web interface produces them automatically. We saw scary peaks of over 9kWs in the days after installing our unit – it would be good to have much more time detail on the x axis in purchase to try and track down much more accurately when these peaks occurred. however you can export your data to a CSV file in purchase to analyse it in much more detail in your preferred spreadsheet.
Data Graphs & web interface – Click images for full size version
The web interface is still a little quirky for our tastes and some options still seem buried away and hard to find. AlertMe should believe the cartoony graphics somehow make it a easy interface. It doesn’t. like we said in our review of the safety and security system we think it’s time for a redesign here – or at the very least offer a much more stylish ‘skin’ for the web application. We really like the clean new look of the AlertMe.com site and hopefully some of its design elements might make it into a revamped web interface in the future.
Web interface – Click images for full size version
How Do You save Money? – While the system is not 100% accurate it ought to offer a good approximation of your power usage. What it can’t do is change anything – that bit is up to you. It takes some interest from the user and some time invested to make the savings. probably the most beneficial thing you can do is to decrease your base line consumption – the items that are using power 24/7. This is the figure that’s always there in the background. Your energy usage will top when someone boils the kettle, turns on the washing device or the cooker. but the baseline comes from things like your fridge, your AV amplifier on standby, your media server etc, all the ‘stuff’ that’s in use all day, every day. Here’s an easy way to look at it – current electrical power prices in the UK are roughly £1 per year for every 1 watt used 24/7. So, if you could decrease your baseline by 200 watts you could save around £200 per year.
To help youfurther, you can monitor an individual device by adding an AlertMe SmartPlug to your setup. This allows you to measure power usage for a discrete appliance, as well as turn it on and off remotely. We’ll be taking a look at the SmartPlug in much more detail in a future article. To get you started, you ought to consider purchasing a basic plugin meter to help measure which devices are the should power hungry.
You can setup your ‘Energy’ to email you when consumption goes above and/or below a certain threshold and using this feature we discovered that our tumble drier was a huge drain on power. We’re now using it a lot less.
You can easily monitor things remotely by logging in to a special mobile optimised site – mobile.alertme.com – to view your live usage from your smart phone.
The AlertMe energy Mobile interface on the iPhone
Swingometer – All meter readers installed on an AlertMe system feed data into their Swingometer. The system allocates them to regions based on the post code given by the user. While AlertMe wouldn’t offer us with exact figures they say there are currently ‘hundreds’ of hubs creating the data for the UK snapshot.
The Future – as with the AlertMe wireless Zigbee sensors used in their safety and security system – the clamp transmitter houses a temperature sensor. homes like ours with an exterior meter box can get a good approximation of the outdoor temperature from the clamp sensor. This can show helpful for creating a software ‘weather compensator’ system for a central heating controller. While there’s currently no way to extract this data from the system, AlertMe are developing their own Heating Controller and they tell us it will have its own separate service which will enable you to program the heating on a day by day basis.
We’re sure other utility sensors should be in the works too. how long before there’s a Zigbee gas monitoring sensor, or how about one for oil fired central heating or even water coming into the home? These are all parameters the Automated home of the future is going to require.
Conclusion – For us the only real issue with the device is the on-going £1.99 monthly subscription. It’s good to see AlertMe have recently dropping the cost of the hardware from £69 to £49. While the monthly sub dropped from £2.99 to £1.99, paying year after year still seems at odds with a device thats main purpose in life is to save you money. We’d love to see AlertMe producing a version without an ongoing fee, possibly charging a little much more upfront like with the ‘Lifetime Subscription’ model TiVo employed.
While the AlertMe energy is squarely aimed at the mass market, it ought to also appeal to the smart home geek too. The ability to check your energy usage from any screen in the house – or anywhere in the world from a computer with web access, or even just your smart phone, is fantastic. It’s so much better than having to walk to a particular location in the house to look at a static display. The historical data is invaluable too for spotting usage patterns and trends that can be adjusted for savings. The AlertMe energy system is a delight to own, install and use, and its link to Google Powermeter is the icing on the cake.
AlertMe.com : purchase a Meter : other home Power monitoring alternatives : AlertMe home safety and security System Review
Want More? – Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, or subscribe to our RSS feed. You can even get these news stories delivered through email, straight to your inbox every day
Share this:
Facebook
Twitter
Reddit
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Email
More
WhatsApp
Print
Skype
Tumblr
Telegram
Pocket