Show HN: Ecoisme – A smart energy monitor for your home appliances | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ecoisme – A smart energy monitor for your home appliances

ecoisme.com

38 pointscolemannerd14 comments

If this is something that just informs me where electricity is being used, it doesn't necessarily save me money, does it? Many times, I know that my son has not turned off the vanity lights in the upstairs bathroom, but am too lazy to go up there and turn it off myself. What would help is a robot that goes around turning off lights and other electrical equipment if it doesn't find someone using that light sources, etc :-)...

Yep, Ecoisme isn't a robot which turns off lights in your home ;) Ecoisme provides you with statistics of energy usage for every major home appliance and specify you clear steps how you can reduce your energy consumption. Also Ecoisme can be integrated with IoT devices in your home and then it will be possible to control them remotely.

How does this differ from Neurio? http://neur.io/

I dont think it does differ much from it (or from other several similar "home energy monitors"), there are probably tens of similar ones, just to name a few besides neurio, sense, eyedro, smappee, curb:

http://www.postscapes.com/wifi-home-energy-monitor-neurio/

On Hacker News, this one (Open Source and Raspberry PI based) would probably be more relevant:

https://openenergymonitor.org/emon/

Jaclaz, yes, you are right, there are quite a few companies in this field. Every company has its own approach. For example, Curb does not make device detection, but shows you statistics on the circuit level (you need to connect it to every circuit breaker), Neurio detects only devices which consume more than 400W, etc.

In our case, we are focusing on reliable device detection of major home appliances (we detect home appliances which consume more than 100W). We detect devices by our algorithms and users can teach the system via training mode for more precise recognition. Beside this, we support 3-phase electrical networks (for both grid and grid+solar) and we support 220V/50Hz networks (so Ecoisme works in both Europe and US).

Maybe it would be useful to highlight somewhere, maybe a small factsheet as a .pdf, such differences/enhancements, from a quick look at your site I couldn't detect those.

And - at least to me - it would be interesting if (without of course revealing any trade secret) you could describe how you can identify devices, i.e. which parameters allow you to distinguish (or classify) devices connected to the same breaker.

Something like this (now old) paper? http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~shwetak/papers/ubicomp200...

The technology looks interesting, but can I switch off the devices remotely? It would be great to switch off home appliances, not just monitor their usage. For example, if I left the stove on, do I need to drive back to my home?

Hey Loevborg! Thank you for your interest in our product! Yes, Ecoisme will be integrated with connected home appliances and you will be able to turn off these home appliances remotely.

I was working in a system like this some time ago. I thought that you need a sensor for each appliance. I like the idea of AI to detect the electrical signature of appliances and only use one sensor.

Azaras, thank you for your comment! You need only one device per home to detect all major appliances, this is the main feature of our system. Will you be at the CES? It would be great to have a chat there :) Our booth at the CES is 51841 Sands.

I have tried similar devices but they are not very accurate, and this is worrying me. I haven't seen the device yet that's reliable enough to detect every home appliance.

We use different approach to device recognition: we detect devices by our algorithms and users can teach the system via training mode for more precise recognition. We can show you how our algorithms works at CES'2017! Our booth there is #51841 Sands

Does it has an integration with smart homes? I mean, whether I can remotely switch off an iron, if I forgot.

Hi LisaDziuba! Yes, Ecoisme will be integrated with IoT devices and smart home platforms like Apple Home Kit, Samsung Smart Things, etc.

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