

Ask HN: Would you pre-order GridSpy power monitoring? - gridspy

Gridspy provides an online power monitoring service - see http://gridspy.co.nz<p>It can monitor 3 AC circuits in your home or office and allow you to watch that power on-line. It measures "true power" and power factor. It can handle 3 phase power for industry.<p>Our device has a relatively high price tag attached $950NZD ($665USD). There is a recurring $10/mo subscription.<p>We have true live connections to the devices, and optional RS232 and RS485 ports - along with automation possibilities. We can also monitor a wide range of other sensors (i.e tank levels, gas / water flow, solar, temperature, humidity, air quality). We'll soon have a nice API and webhooks (HTTP POST back to your server).<p>I've been approached by several people asking when we are available, if we ship to the US, etc. We have a working product with stock, but can't send it afield just yet (testing still required). I'd be able to ship a preorder to you in perhaps two months.<p>If I built a pre-order portal to purchase Gridspy at a discounted price (say $400USD) with a promise to offer all new features as they become available and offer premium service for a low monthly charge - would you take me up on the offer?<p>If not, why not?<p>What automation tangent (new features) could we pursue that would convince you?
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stakent
Short answer:

For home use - no. Price is to high, subscription fee is show stopper for me.

Long answer:

Home use

Why will be home owner or tenant bothered by power use?

First group - people bothered by energy cost. The calculation is simple: the
cost of hardware and accumulated subscription fees has to be recouped by
energy cost savings in one year.

Yearly subscriptions fee $120, hardware cost, say, $200 gives $320 cost of the
first year use of the service.

Energy cost $0.1 per kWh so we have to save at 3200 kWh per year to break out
our investment.

3200 kWh per year means, if power consumption is constant, reducing energy
draw by about 0.37 kW.

Doable, but is it easy?

Replace incandescent light bulbs by more energy efficient compact fluorescent
light bulbs or led light bulbs. Done.

Is cost sensitive home owner the target group? He can be if the price is
right. Read - low enough. So - mass production, lower cost per hardware unit,
lot of subscriptions sold on ongoing basis. Well, there is one problem. Up
front spend on hardware batch. And second one. How to reach these cost
sensitive home owners? Marketing. Which means more money up front. Which means
more risk. By the way, that means competing on price what is not the best idea
for someone starting with limited funds.

Second group - people bothered by Earth future, global warming.

Each saved kilowatt hour means less about 2.3 lb (1 kg) of CO2 emitted to
atmosphere. Saving 3 kWh daily during a year means about 1000 kg less CO2
emitted to atmosphere.

How reach people bothered by Earth future? It looks little bit easier. Is it
easy enough?

Third group - early adopters, geeks looking for new gadget.

The new cool gadget has a little drawback. It is clipped on the electrical
wires, presumably in the hidden electrical box. How to show it to other geeks?
There is website with fancy graphs, twitter integration, facebook integration
and, of course, iPhone application. And some game mechanics, a little
competition: who has smaller energy consumption, who is greener so can be
awarded by, say, more images of green leaves. Or bigger tree image. Or blue
ribbon. Or ...

This group looks easier to target. It has another nice feature. Virtually all
of them can be called linkerati, which leads to some nice side effects. Links,
SEO, boost in visibility.

Industrial and commercial use

One 10 kW motor working all year long uses 86400 kWh. Let's assume energy
costs $0.05 per kWh. Yearly cost: $4320.

Completely different game.

Industrial environment is harsh. Electromagnetic noise level is really high
despite all countermeasures. Current in wires is hardly sinusoidal because of
all theses nonlinear power receivers (eg. frequency converters).

What savings are possible in industrial environment?

Use less energy. Use GridSpy for ad hoc power monitoring during machine
tunning. Possible for air conditioning, refrigeration, making compressed air,
pumping.

Use cheaper energy - prices vary during the day and week. Locating low hanging
fruit.

Do not pay for use more power than contracted. Add an ability to alarm someone
if there is to much power drawn, allow to change the formula for power
calculation. Example: power calculated as 15 minutes average or an 1 hour
average.

Do not pay for too low power factor. Power factor monitoring and alarm
someone.

Another beast is data reflecting production put on the internet. I know,
passwords, vendor commitment to security etc. but ... Btw. this concern exists
for home use too.

Despite that all energy conservation is an interesting field.

~~~
gridspy
Wow. Thanks for the through reply.

The price is high, as you mention - once we have an established cashflow with
industrial clients and proven technology it will be possible to gradually
migrate into the much more cost sensitive residential sector. To enter that
sector from the get-go seems like a huge mistake to me.

Sure, the subscription fee is a showstopper. I'd like to have several levels
of subscription:

Free: Live data online, 2 days moderate resolution (sample per minute) / 1
week low resolution (sample per 15 minutes) history. Simple embeddable widgets
/ twitter usage notifications, etc.

$6 /mo ($10 NZD): As free, 1 year moderate resolution, 10 years low
resolution. Add Webhooks, SMS, email, alarms, budgets, etc. Premium: (this is
for industrial, price TBD) 1 month ultra-high resolution (1 second samples),
unlimited storage for other data.

Most home users would be satisfied by that free option.

As for your customers:

 _First Group (price sensitive domestic):_

I agree. I'm not even attempting to reach this market right now.

 _Second Group (CO^2 sensitive):_

I think that these users will be most interested in fostering power saving
competitions within and between different businesses. Most of them have
probably optimised the hell out of their domestic power usage.

They might be interested in leasing our system for a month to validate their
power saving measures. If they have off-grid power, our solar integration
might interest them.

 _Third Group (Early adopters):_

The device itself isn't that sexy. As you mention, it is the online dashboard
that makes it good. To reach this market segment, it is important that we have
great integration with a wide range of other tech toys. I'd also like to make
it really easy to hack together neat things using our live data via webhooks
and the API.

I'm looking forward to the linkerati aspect. Hopefully we can foster a
situation like Twitter - people linking proudly and prominently to their
GridSpy Dashboard to prove their Green/Geek cred.

 _Industrial Environment:_

Good point about the non-linearities in industrial circuits. Gridspy could be
used to hunt down the poor power characteristics that cause industrials to be
penalised by the power supplier. Because of our realtime data acquisition, we
could highlight the power factor of motors during startup, running or
shutdown. This would help electricians locate and fix key power issues.

As you mention we could be used to help cut power usage during certain times
of day. We could also perform load-shedding - turn off AC while many motors
spinning up for instance. The peak power usage during the day needs to be kept
down to reduce power cost. Finally alarms and budgets could be used to attract
attention to important issues.

All in all I'm pretty excited about our opportunities in the industrial
sector. I think that the Residential sector is too disinterested and price
sensitive to enjoy GridSpy.

------
jacquesm
_relatively_ high ? $950 ?? That's not relatively high, that's simply
overpriced.

 _and_ a recurring ???

I would not pre-order that until the price came down to what consumer
electronics with this much functionality should cost, probably around the $40
mark or so. And that recurring billing bit for a feature that you could easily
throw in for free is simply grafted on to make a spreadsheet look good
somewhere.

Why on earth did you decide to complicate matters so much ? Your average
consumer is not going to order these in quantities large enough to make it
happen. A scaled down version that would cost $40 to $50 and that would simply
monitor your electricity usage and report to a website (for free) so you can
do your sampling using the simplest of pic chips would do wonders for energy
savings and would be earned back in a foreseeable time.

Rule 1: keep it simple.

Don't break rule one.

Multiple hundreds of dollars are a completely different decision point than <
50, and as your volume goes up your costs go down further so your profits will
rise. People visiting the site to see their stats and to compare their stats
with other people in their neighbourhood (who gets to have the lowest
electricity bill) would be a great way to create a community of energy
conscious people.

There must be a better way to monetize that than to charge them for the
privilege of supplying you with valuable data...

So, not 'more features' to sway people, _less features_ at a much better price
and a smarter plan to monetize your users in the longer term.

~~~
gridspy
$50 with no recurring revenue is well covered by lots of cheap, simple,
inaccurate meters. See [http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-
monitorin...](http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-monitoring-
tools/)

As a price example, here is a direct competitor:
<http://www.luciddesigngroup.com/starter.php>

$10,000 USD up front, $2,000 per annum recurring.

And here is WattVision, which has the "all the benefits (and weaknesses) of a
smart meter, available today" <http://www.wattvision.com/>

Also, GridSpy is far simpler than many competitors. If you are suggesting that
we provide a device so you can create your own site to receive data, the
creating a site part is not simple for 99% of the population.

Thanks for highlighting how we need to shift the language on the site so it is
obvious it is priced for industrial power monitoring. Also thanks for your
input.

~~~
jacquesm
I don't understand something then. You are asking the people here if they
would pre-order grid-spy, but the majority (the large majority) of your
audience here has absolutely no application for industrial power monitoring,
unless they run their own data centers, I think just about all your
respondents took it in the context of their regular home power consumption,
unless I'm reading them wrong.

If you want to know about the reception in that segment of the market then HN
is the wrong place to ask, a gathering of captains of industry in the
manufacturing or the retail end of things would be a better target.

~~~
gridspy
Yeah, I totally agree. It did foster some interesting discussion though, which
is what I really wanted.

I thought perhaps there might be some early adopters here interested in the
data and how they could use it.

There are easy ways to meet captains of industry, chief among them power
saving associations such as <http://www.eeca.govt.nz/>

------
waivej
I know a small data center (tiny) that might be interested for monitoring the
air conditioners. Though that's a bit of a stretch and they probably wouldn't
want to spend the $.

But, it makes me wonder if that might be good for other things like monitoring
commercial refrigerators... especially if it could send alarms. I'm not too
worried if my house draws a little extra energy...but if I might be worried if
thousands of dollars are on the line if equipment fails.

Also, a business might have more people looking at the stats and more room to
save $ with efficiency improvements.

~~~
gridspy
Yeah, I think that Business customers are the a major potential market.

------
seasoup
$950! It seems the only reason to buy your product is to save money by knowing
my consumption patterns. That's ALOT of electricity I'd need to save to make
up $950. Plus, are you going to save me at least $10/month?

But when it comes down to it, I don't want to have to think about my energy
consumption, I don't want to compare charts and graphs and geek out on it. I
just want to know how to use less without having to do more work.

That's from a consumer viewpoint, I have no idea what industry would think or
want.

Good luck!

~~~
gridspy
Thanks for your honesty.

I hope that people who have $10,000 per month power bills can see the benefit
of localising their power usage to a faulty air conditioning system or
inefficient lighting.

Our price won't be suitable for homeowners until we manufacture in quantity.

~~~
seasoup
But once they locate that, why would they want to pay $10 month? After they
have gone through the process of cutting down their $10,000 energy bill, what
will they save with an additional $120/year? I think you might have some ideas
around that, but you need a good story.

~~~
gridspy
Because most employees are lazy when it comes to power conservation.

They will install a GridSpy solution and discover that everyone is leaving
computers and lights on all night. Then they send an email around saying
"please turn off your computers and lights tonight."

The next morning, they look at their dashboard and calculate that they saved
$40 last night, or $1,200 if they can keep it up all month. A week later,
GridSpy shows that people are getting slack and leaving computers on at night
again. Now management has real data to back them up when they point out how
keeping up this behaviour is important.

Left to itself, power usage will most likely revert to the mean as people move
back to their old habits, new employees enter, new equipment is added and so
on. A continued installation should help to prevent this.

------
waivej
Cost for me... I really enjoy our TED (<http://www.theenergydetective.com>)
which aims more at a residential market. ($150 US) The instant feedback has
been great for learning. The web interface isn't a big draw.

I imagine that commercial markets would be better for your
product...especially in classrooms or companies that want to show off how
green they are. (especially if it has really pretty graphics to embed into
their website.)

~~~
gridspy
Your point about Green cred and imbedded graphs is also where I see a major
future selling point for our system.

Interesting point about not wanting to see power usage online. Fair enough.

------
rscott
No. The price is exorbitant for what I would ever get out of it. People would
not rather have this service than say, a new 42" HDTV and TiVo service.

~~~
gridspy
Cheers for your points. Greenies and huge power hogs only I guess :)

------
gridspy
Hot : <http://gridspy.co.nz>

Blog : <http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/>

Overview of our stack : [http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-
sensors...](http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors-to-
browsers.html)

------
noodle
the only way you'll convince me is if you can convince me that by paying for
this expensive product and for the monthly subscription, that i will be saving
money in the long run.

and of this i'm not convinced, as a residential power user.

~~~
gridspy
Yes, Gridspy won't be convincing until it pays for itself inside a year. For a
residential user, that means we need high volume manufacture to reduce prices
first.

~~~
noodle
as an early adopter, i'd even be cool if we were talking 2 or 3 years, but i'm
skeptical of even that, still.

~~~
gridspy
I think that you could find many more surprising power sinks in a large
business than in a home - in a house you know exactly what you have purchased.
In an office, there are so many people involved it is practically unknowable
without monitoring, advance planning or a through (and expensive) audit.

I think that our system will be much more compelling for home owners as the
quantities go up, the prices come down and the features get filled out.

