
Ask HN: Would you preorder a Copper solar monitor? - andrewzimmer
Copper provides a small whole house energy tracker that plugs into your wall - see https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copperlabs.com<p>We monitor by reading wirelessly from your existing meter, no smart meter required. All data is then crunched in the cloud and sent to your smart phone with a 1-30 minute delay.<p>We can get consumption, generation, and net values from most new solar installations (assuming they don&#x27;t use smart meters). We&#x27;ve been approached by a few solar installers, and are thinking that the solar market might be an more effective starting niche.<p>If I added some solar first features to our app, would you be interested in the tracker? If not, why not? What actionable solar data is missing?<p>Here&#x27;s a screenshot : http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;uIRiUYH
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ScottBurson
> We monitor by reading wirelessly from your existing meter, no smart meter
> required.

Can you give me some clue how that works? Do the old meters put out some kind
of signal on the house wiring or something?

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andrewzimmer
Sure. The electric company rolls trucks to the older meters (known as AMR
meters). These trucks have a big radio in them that listens for the meters,
which broadcast wirelessly on a spread spectrum frequency. We made some
hardware that can listen to your meter at 30 sec intervals and graph your
energy use from the resulting data.

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ScottBurson
Ah, okay, I found this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_meter_reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_meter_reading)

Looks like there's some variety in how meters broadcast, though. Is there some
way to tell by looking at the meter which technique it uses? Do you support
both DSSS and FHSS?

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andrewzimmer
We're focused on FHSS which covers about 60% of the US (we've gotten 600k
reads from about 10 different states so far). DSSS is newer and used by mostly
smart meters (ZibBee for example), which have some other blockers like
encryption keys.

We look for a barcode on the meter to tell if it's FHSS, if you grab our
iPhone app it'll walk you through the process.

