
Wattvision: The Smart Energy Sensor - savrajsingh
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wattvision/wattvision-the-smart-energy-sensor?ref=live
======
tptacek
I'm in.

I have a 1st-gen Wattvision. I used it for approximately 3 days before
forgetting about it and eventually disconnecting it, and for perhaps a total
of 35 minutes, and I'm pretty confident it paid for itself easily despite my
lackadaisical usage.

I've been wondering what these people were up to for the past couple years,
and I'm glad they're doing a next rev. This is a great product.

~~~
aw3c2
If you did not use it over a longer time, how did it pay for itself? Did you
shut off some major power consumers in your household after you look at it
once?

~~~
tptacek
Yep.

------
mv
I really wanted one of these when they first came out, however, the arrogance
of having locked down hardware really irked me...

iirc you had to pay something like $5/month after spending $250 for the sensor
just to have access to the data! After spending $250 for it, I would have like
to be able to write my own script to read the data off the device and not rely
on their web service.... not having open access really turned me off...

This one is much cheaper : [http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-EM100B-Energy-
Monitor/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-EM100B-Energy-
Monitor/dp/B001ELJKLE) and it occasionally can be had for a simple $25... sure
it'd take some hacking to get the data to the computer, but avoids the
insulting monthly fee!

~~~
tptacek
Comments like this are part of why we have "Fear of Money":

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377054>

It is one thing to say "Wattvision costs too much for me; I think they should
lower or restructure the price".

It is another thing to say "the way this startup has structured their pricing
is insulting to me".

The fact that you were easily able to come up with a market substitute for
this offering just underscores how silly the idea of being "insulted" by
pricing is.

Things cost what they cost, not what we think they should cost. As a general
rule, we HN'ers _suck_ at thinking about what things should cost.

~~~
Dylan16807
Charging for a service is fine, but I agree that it is legitimately insulting
to charge for use of a consumer-owned device.

That said, what wattvision lists in its FAQ is extremely fair. Using data from
the last three months is free, so if you want to do your own processing you
can easily download from there even if the device is difficult to directly
access.

------
nostromo
This is great. Recently I noticed that Seattle doubles the cost of your
electricity when you exceed a certain threshold.
([http://www.seattle.gov/light/accounts/rates/docs/2012/Jan/20...](http://www.seattle.gov/light/accounts/rates/docs/2012/Jan/2012Jan_rsc.pdf))

With the API I'm going to write a little script to monitor usage and send me a
prowl alert when we're close to the limit. Fun stuff!

Edit: I was considering adding PV panels to my roof. If my meter runs in
reverse during the day, will WattVision still work?

------
jordn
Hate to be a downer but there are a _lot_ of products in this exact same space
(several of which started 3/4 years ago and have since died.)

Alertme is probably one of the slickest
(<https://www.alertme.com/try_the_demo>) and there are many others that just
provide a nerd-happy line graph like this and even more with just the
price/day calculation, but the problem they've all found is that after _at
most_ a month, people become disinterested.

I'd like to see some innovation in how you can keep this relevant and
interesting to the continual user.

~~~
savrajsingh
Thanks for the feedback, and yes, we're working on keeping users engaged. Most
of the competitors you reference require you to go inside of your breaker box
(require an electrician) to set up in the United States, among other
shortcomings.

~~~
jordn
Ah that explains what I perceived was a very over-engineered way of measuring
the current. I've used several of the clip on readers myself in the UK -
trivial install - and in fact several British electric providers have sent out
their own current usage displays to customers.

Then again I haven't seen any popular usage of NLM (several apps were trying
when I last looked) that can determine how much an individual appliance is
costing really simply, i.e. the hairdryer cost $3.12 to run this month. That
info could be really compelling and could spin out more ideas but doing this
non-intrusive load monitoring sounds rather difficult with your data
collection method.

------
atourgates
In my opinion, the "next big thing" in home energy usage is device-level
monitoring. The ability to look at your realtime -energy-usage, and say, "Oh,
it looks like my fridge is using this much energy, and my A/C is using that
much..."

There are a couple companies that are starting to offer this. Bidgely -
<http://bidgely.com/> \- (which is compatible with Wattvision's hardware) on
the residential side of things, and Verdigris -
<http://www.verdigristech.com/> \- on the commercial side.

~~~
jrockway
I posted a link to the Tweet-a-Watt which is exactly this. If you don't need
computerized monitoring, you can just buy a plain Kill-a-Watt at your local
hardware store for $20. I use it on my AC and find it quite helpful.

~~~
atourgates
Actually - the two companies I linked are exciting because they can do device-
level monitoring with just a single monitoring device at the meter.

Both companies do a horrible job of explaining this on their website, but one
of my coworkers went to a presentation they were both at the other week.

Basically, they have a database of unique waveforms(?) (I'm an electrical
illiterate, so I may be saying something quite stupid) for individual devices
and appliances. So, for example, when you plug in MacBook Air to recharge it,
they know the unique profile of the effect that device will have on your home
or office's power consumption, so they can separate it from your overall power
draw.

Which means that the software, using a single measurement point, can break
down your home or office's entire energy consumption by individual device /
appliance in realtime.

Which to me, seems a bit mind-blowing. But like I said, both companies do a
horrible job of explaining this on their websites.

~~~
RobotCaleb
That sounds really awesome. Now to find the cheapest hardware to get me on
there.

------
EvanAnderson
Another product that obviously doesn't _need_ to be Internet-connected to
function but is (presumably to create a recurring revenue model for the
manufacturer). A $250.00 retail price is too much, to me, to risk on a device
that will be relegated to the junk heap once the back-end "cloud service"
disappears after the manufacturer fails.

~~~
tptacek
This is a totally fair concern, but if your alternative is "not having any
kind of fine-grained monitoring of power at all", know that you are very
likely throwing money away; it does not take a lot of renegade appliances (or,
in my case, renegade incandescent bulbs) to offset the cost of the sensor.

I have bought very few things that had such a clear ROI so quickly after I set
them up.

~~~
brianleb
That last sentence tipped me off to the real matter at hand. I think the
problem is that you can't appreciate the ROI of the product until you've
experienced/received the ROI of the product. And in truth, it isn't an easy
choice - the most likely way for me to save money on electricity would be to
change my habits. If it were easy, then I could do it without this $250
device. If I wanted to change, then I would just do it. This thing would guilt
or otherwise convince me to change myself, which is typically not an easy or
pleasant thing.

I'm writing as someone who could afford the $250 device (and would probably
benefit from it, given the quantity of electronics in my home), but I'm just
not convinced enough to take the plunge. What it would take for me is seeing
one in action and laying hands on the device or talking in detail to a friend
about their outcomes with the device. But right now, it all just seems like a
pipe dream, and I can spend less than $250 on a pipe dream.

~~~
tptacek
Savings for us had absolutely zero to do with habits, unless stuff like
incandescent bulbs are a habit.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So you didn't know you had incandescent bulbs until you used the wattvision,
or whatever, or you didn't realise they used more power, or you didn't realise
leaving them on used more power???

~~~
tptacek
There were a couple of things plugged in in my house that were chewing up huge
amounts of electricity. Very large incandescent bulbs in our bathrooms were
one of them.

~~~
icebraining
Wouldn't it have took you less time to check the wattage of each bulb on the
house than having to buy, receive, install and run this meter?

~~~
tptacek
No? The whole point of the meter is that it won't occur to you what things to
look at. The entire value proposition is spotting those things for you.

If you're the kind of person who memorizes the wattage of everything you plug
into your house, then yes, this might not be money well spent. It was for me.

------
ghayes
I find the API to be the most interesting part of this project. When you can
plug this data into NILM[1] algorithms, you can then calculate the cost of
running an appliance in your house and check online for less expensive
alternatives.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonintrusive_load_monitoring>

~~~
CamperBob2
I was about to post a "they're doing it wrong" comment, suggesting just this
sort of thing. Interesting that the idea of applying vector network analysis
to household power monitoring is so old that the patent has expired.

Using an optical sensor to monitor a spinning-wheel meter is just goofy, and
so, for that matter, is the direct connection to the AC mains in the patent.
All of the information they need can be sensed magnetically, by proximity to
the house's power feed.

~~~
sitkack
You mean like this,
[http://salestores.com/tenma727218c.html?gclid=CLqlss7l5bECFW...](http://salestores.com/tenma727218c.html?gclid=CLqlss7l5bECFWoZQgodXiAA9w)

~~~
CamperBob2
Something like that, yes. Combine that concept with the notion of the SWR
bridge, and there's no reason you couldn't do vector analysis, rather than
just scalar sensing.

~~~
sitkack
Why not build what you describe, clamp it around the main feed to the house
and have it join the wifi network, it can pubsub the data anywhere at that
point.

This would be an order of magnitude better than just reading the meter.

~~~
CamperBob2
Yeah, I think we'll see the power companies doing that themselves before too
long, if they aren't already.

------
csense
The manufacturer should make a commitment to open source all the code
necessary for the community to get it working locally on a LAN without any of
that cloudy goodness. Why?

(1) As other posters have pointed out, there's no guarantee that they won't go
out of business or drop support in the future. If open drivers are available,
it's all good.

(2) As I've long said in relation to nVidia's dragging their feet on releasing
open-source graphics drivers: IF YOU'RE A HARDWARE COMPANY, THERE'S NO REASON
NOT TO OPEN-SOURCE YOUR SOFTWARE. If you're a company like MSFT and software
is all you sell, obviously you can't open-source your products, because then
why would anyone ever pay you anything? OTOH for a hardware maker, THE
SOFTWARE IS USELESS WITHOUT THE HARDWARE. If this is even marginally popular,
people will hack on the software, and the better the open software gets, the
easier it is to sell hardware. Essentially the community is giving away their
development resources for free.

(3) The above may not apply if they're selling the HW at cost or even a loss,
expecting to make it up on subscriptions. That's simply a pricing/marketing
problem: Merely increase the unit price until selling the HW is profitable,
and include a code for a free year or two of the online service. Or give
progressive discounts for people who sign up for
quarter/half/one/two/three/five years when they buy, to encourage purchases.

(4) I hate it when my personal information's floating around out there in the
cloud. Electricity usage data could be useful for burglars or stalkers to see
what times nobody's home during the day, when you turn out the lights at
night, if you might be on vacation because no appliances have run for days...I
really hope the data feed uses SSL.

------
rhplus
_iPhone and Android support_

I'm curious why a small kickstarter would want to build specific apps for each
device. Is this critical day one stuff for small startups like this and is
there a real customer need for an app in a marketplace? Instead of just
building a simple HTML5 site that'd work on all modern devices and browsers,
that is.

~~~
tptacek
The 1st gen Wattvision already has a web interface.

------
enterneo
We are couple of graduate students who implemented an end-to-end IPv6 social
telemetry platform as a lab project last semester. We have a meter that is
connected to the lab's coffee machine and refrigerator. The web interface [1]
can plots the energy usage of these devices. We decided to make the data
public to help evangelize the importance of being able to live monitor the
energy usage of one's appliances. In fact, we encourage you to go check out
the website and you'll see a live plot with spikes whenever we brew coffee!

We also implemented an Android application that complements the user
interface, and plan to expand this project further by installing more meters.

Details on the project are available at [2]

[1] <http://www.wattsapp.net/>

[2] <http://www.wattsapp.net/about.html>

------
shawndrost
Awesome dead comment:

\-------

The Wattvision doesn't appear to be anything new.

I had a CurrentCost Envi unit (that read with non-intrusive clamps over the
leads in the breaker box) that did much the same thing, and would output its
data over serial. Tied in with Google Power Meter and so forth.

Then, my utility installed the new "Smart Meters", and a few months after that
they offered me a countertop unit that talks to the meter using ZigBee and
gives me real-time usage information (and historical graphs, etc). For free.

Using the data I get from this, along with a Nest smart "learning thermostat"
I installed last year, has reduced my "height of summer" electric bills to
around $140/month from almost $300/month a few years ago.

I've still got the CurrentCost Envi setup, along with "web bridge" unit
(Ethernet interface) if anybody in Houston wants one. Trade me a 12-pack of
Mt. Dew for it or something...

~~~
blibble
in the UK your electricity company will happily send you a currentcost device
that plugs into your PC for free, and it even speaks a very simply protocol
using serial over USB...

------
Mongoose
Why is a YC- and angel-funded startup doing the Kickstarter dance?

<http://www.wattvision.com/info/about>

~~~
politician
Optimistically: Promotion, Pessimistically: Money-grubbing

------
xlevus
I worked for a company that made a product similar to this and I'm not
convinced they work as a consumer product.

Our customers would plug the device in and then use it for maybe two weeks and
then forget about it.

The reality is, for most people there isn't much you can tell them. "Have
shorter showers, turn off appliances at the wall, and buy new whiteware with a
higher EnergyStar rating". In fact, I ended up increasing my power usage as I
realised how little I was saving by turning appliances off.

------
ck2
This reminds me of the crazy movement now that is against smartmeters. I
really do not understand people sometimes.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/science/earth/31meters.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/science/earth/31meters.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

<http://stopsmartmeters.org/>

I'd love a smartmeter as long as I get access to the data myself for free and
no-one else but the power company.

~~~
sliverstorm
A big one, I figure? People don't understand radiation. The smartmeter uses a
wireless communication protocol much like WiFi, but people are still flipping
out about it.

Heck, just reading the articles about the switching mode power supplies- which
every digital device today has- they declare with fright that the smps can
emit frequencies up to 50,000 hz! Oh no! That's nearly an order of magnitude
_lower_ frequency than _AM Radio broadcasts_! It must be deadly!

------
Chirael
Just sent this message via Kickstarter to the Wattvision people:

This is pretty awesome.

I know it's unrelated, but something that would be REALLY awesome is something
like this that worked for water usage.

I manage several properties and a running toilet left unfixed for a few weeks
can easily rack up $500, $1000, or more in costs.

If I could put a device on my water meters for each property which would alert
me immediately when the usage increased by a certain amount, that would
ABSOLUTELY be worth paying for - especially as the price of water has gone up
so much.

(I read an article about 6 months ago about some communities in the southern
U.S. where the residents are literally being priced out of being able to
afford running water.)

PLEASE consider working on this. Right now, the only way a landlord will know
about a leaking faucet or toilet is 1) if the tenant lets her/him know (fat
chance, it's nothing urgent to them, if they even notice it, or 2) after they
water bill has skyrocketed in a month - and then it's way too late :(

thank you, Anthony

------
jefarmstrong
These guys are in my backyard and are featured in a great documentary on
sustainability which focuses on the Sourland mountains in NJ
(<http://www.sourlands.com/>).

------
killerpopiller
those solutions already exist even as open source

<http://volkszaehler.org/>

------
physcab
If any Wattvision customers are here, or if the team is looking at this, I'm
curious...what kinds of changes in behavior have you noticed?

I ask because my electrical consumption is relatively constant. I come home,
turn on the TV, make dinner, surf the internet, pass out. I've noticed that
its tough to influence my bill in any direction, except from when the weather
changes from hot to cold and vice versa. But those are changes I'm conscious
of and fully expect to be paying more during the extremes.

------
rickdale
I understand the global implications of energy usage. But being from an old
factory town I wonder if on a local scale now that the factories are all gone
there is less energy consumption. I see the energy companies changing to all
of the smart grid tech and I wonder if there would ever be a need to change
the grid to support more power. Seems like everyone is into less power
consumption, but if you do weld or have a garden its tough to keep power bills
low. thats my two cents.

------
figital
I've got a "TED" which appears to have similar functionality.

<http://www.theenergydetective.com>

The main obstacle to usage is making sure you don't kill yourself during
installation. Not sure why there would be any recurring fees (other than to
scare you into donating early!) ... are you going to charge me to put my own
data into a bar chart? (ahh ... that's why)

------
RobotCaleb
I really like the idea, but I feel weird about just giving them access to my
usage data. Are there any solutions out there that don't involve cloud storage
or monthly fees?

I'll store my own data, thank you very much.

------
pbhjpbhj
From the linked page:

> _now I receive credits on my bills_ //

I thought the device just told you how much power your devices were drawing.
How does knowing that allow you to get a credit on your bill?

~~~
icebraining
At least where I live, we pay an estimated value every month, and then when
they come to check the numbers on the meter, they either add a surcharge or a
credit to the next bill. So if we lowered our power draw thanks to the device,
we'd get a credit after the next reading.

That said, I don't know if the person your quoted is in the same situation or
not.

------
jrockway
Alternatively: <http://www.ladyada.net/make/tweetawatt/>

------
pragmatic
> Find energy-draining devices, including faulty appliances.

How do this work?

~~~
pragmatic
Maybe like this?

<http://bidgely.com/technology-peek>

