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Hello HN! I'm one of the creators of Glow.

Glow is the first full home energy monitor that you can install without calling an electrician or taking your life in your hands. In addition to providing a detailed web interface & mobile app, Glow changes color in real-time based on how much power you're using. Our findings have been that this information slowly improves how you use power, much like how the Prius's introduction of a real-time MPG display causes people to drive more efficiently. Glow also has goal setting, IoT integrations, and alerts if your energy usage is unusually high, for example when an electric oven has been left on by accident.

One of the things I'm most proud of about Glow is how we found a way to use the magnetic field sensors commoditized by cell phones and a clever calibration technique to measure your power usage non-invasively.

We've been working on Glow for over two years and testing it in real world homes for over 9 months. We'd love your feedback and support if it interests you.



Congrats on the launch!

However, why should I use this instead of a smart meter coupled with load profile disaggregation (i.e. no additional devices necessary)?

Disclosure: I work for a smart metering company in Germany that offers that.


Does your smart meter provide real time output? In the US, they're usually only hourly samples.


Almost. We get updates every two seconds.


a) Feedback needs to be real-time (e.g. < 10s) b) Humans need that extra device. In home displays are key to long term daily user engagement. c) Disaggregation doesn't show super positive results so far.

Super easy read on the subject: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.00962.pdf


1. I was not aware that smart meters do not provide (near) real time data in the US. In that case your product makes sense of course.

2. Interesting. I have not considered that case before.

3. What makes you think so? Of course it's not simple but overall our results were positive so far. For example we were able to identify the exact movie being watched at any given time at one of our customers (https://134.147.101.39/media/nds/veroeffentlichungen/2012/07..., unfortunately only available in German).


What I meant by not "showing positive results", is that the actual effect of showing users disaggregated data hasn't yet been shown to be more effective a driving usage reduction than simple whole home data. It's super cool technology though (and that paper is awesome btw).




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