AlertMe SmartEnergy review

With rising utility costs, getting a handle on what’s using power in your home and reducing consumption is a great way to save money, let alone the planet. With its SmartEnergy kit, AlertMe is hoping to provide that visibility.

AlertMe has had an energy monitoring kit for a while, but SmartEnergy is a revamp of the service and now has no monthly subscription costs. The cost of the required hardware has also been reduced to just £50, including a colour screen that lets you see at a glance how much power your home is using.

This already makes it considerably cheaper than the popular Watson Home Energy Monitor (around £90), which only gives you a screen to view power consumption. With AlertMe you get something a lot smarter.

The SmartHub sends your electricity usage figures to the online portal.

The reason for this is down to the SmartHub, which plugs into your broadband connection to upload your data to the AlertMe website. It’s into this that you plug the SmartMeter Reader, which clamps round any of the power cables connected to your electricity meter.

The meter clamp connects to any of the cables coming from your electricity meter.

From the AlertMe web portal you get the real intelligence of the system. By collecting data from your home, AlertMe is able to calculate the base “Always On” level of your home; in other words, the amount of power that your home constantly uses when you’ve turned off everything you normal turn off.

Accessing the portal the widgets on display tell you how much power above or below your Always On level you’re using. You can also view how much power you’re using above or below the average for the day.

Once you’ve told the service how much your electricity tariff is charged at per kWh, it can even tell you how much your house is costing you to run, breaking it down to the averages for Night, Morning, Day, Evening, helping you find out when you’re at your most inefficient.

The AlertMe portal lets you monitor power usage in your home and see how much electricity is costing you.

It’s this level of visibility that makes you think about how much power you’re using, particularly when you notice the Always On level. It makes you want to find out what’s using power and cut out everything unnecessary.

It’s at this point that having the wireless SmartDisplay is very useful, as you can carry it around your house unplugging bits of kit to see how much power they’re using. It’s possible to pretty quickly work out what’s drawing the most amount of power.

You can carry the SmartDisplay around to find out what’s drawing the most amount of power in your home

Plus, it’s neat to be able to see the impact of something like boiling a kettle. We all know that kettles draw a lot of power but when you see your home jump from 400W of usage to near-on 3KW, you really understand why you only want to boil the right amount of water.

The SmartDisplay typically takes around five seconds after a device is switched on to display the increased power usage, due to polling times. It’s a little annoying that the SmartDisplay displays things in kW, where as the web interface uses Watts, but it’s not a major problem. We like the way that the SmartDisplay can be switched from kWh to cost per hour, and you can cycle through cost totals for the current day, week and month.

An iPhone app (there’s currently no Android app) gives you exactly the same information, fitting the same-style web widgets on your phone’s screen. It’s surprisingly handy to have and means that you don’t even necessarily need to plug in or use the SmartDisplay. However, the display gives you the advantage that it has a thermometer built in, so you can measure your home’s temperature.

For more in-depth monitoring and control, AlertMe’s system really comes into action because the SmartHub is ZigBee-enabled to control other ZigBee-enabled devices.

AlertMe can control ZigBee-enabled devices, such as the SmartPlug, which can monitor power consumption for a single device.

This includes the AlertMe SmartPlug (£25). Using the web interface or iPhone app you can control the SmartPlug remotely, turning it on and off. It’s a useful to save power, as you can use this plug to shut down devices that would otherwise be drawing power on standby, such as TV and DVD player. What we particularly like is that the plug has its own power button on the top, so you can manually turn it on and off without looking for a computer.

As well as being able to be remotely controlled, a dedicated power button gives you a manual override.

As well as controlling power, the plug monitors how much power a device is using, so you can find out exactly how much a device is costing you. It starts to get really clever once you add in alerts.

Using the web interface you can get the system to send you alerts based on certain criteria. For example, with the SmartPlug connected to your fridge, you can get an alert should power drop to zero, or your fridge is broken in other words. Alerts can also be applied to the entire system, so you can get an alert if your home suddenly starts using a lot of power.

You can monitor each SmartPlug individually online and set up alerts, too.

It would be nice if the SmartPlugs could be operated on a schedule, automatically cycling lights, for example, when you’re away to make it look as though someone is in.

Other devices can be connected into the system, including the SmartMonitor security kit. This has ZigBee enabled motion, and door and window sensors that you hook into the system. This service costs £4.99 a month, but also adds the ability for sensors to operate SmartPlugs – turning on a light to help the camera capture intruders, for example.

With the optional keyfobs, the system can monitor when everyone is out of the house and then power down all of the SmartPlugs to save power.

The SmartEnergy kit is just the start, as AlertMe supports home monitoring and will have central heating controls in the future.

AlertMe also has plans to bring out a central heating system that will hook into the system, too. With ZigBee smart meters (gas and electricity) available, the system will get a more accurate reading of electricity and even gas usage.

This highlights half the point of the system: it will help you save power now and can be extended to make your home smarter in the future. Given it’s cheaper than rival dumb electricity monitors and so extensible, it’s a great buy if you want to cut your electricity bill.