Know your own power

I had been looking around for a device which can measure the power consumption at home and which can report back as much detail as possible. More than taking away the shock Electricity Bill delivers, I wanted to be aware of the power consumption as it happens and may be some of the event triggers can be utilized too. Like when say the power draw crosses a point when I do not expect it to.

There are solutions which requires you to plug in your appliances via the device into the mains and it in isolation or in conjunction reports the data. These works out cheaper. But then there is no triggering any action based on it. There is no consolidation. And there is the pain of having multiple plugs all to be connected all over the house. With multiple layer of adapters the connections across the house becomes painful.

Then there are other devices which could measure the consumption based on the current drawn from mains using CTs. This was less intrusive and could be done in one place. The device also had ability to set alarms for levels of consumption to alert you of you exceeding quota of usage.

This was a definite improvement to what I started off with. But then came Smappee. A much smarter device which can measure the consumption using the CT like the device I talked about before, but also could report it as triggering actions using IFTTT integration. And it is going to work with Homekit too!

This itself was a big leap for me! But the fun does not stop there. What I was missing in the previous solution of not able to know which device is drawing the power immediately, is taken care of in Smappee! They use some complex algorithm internally to understand the power usage signature of different appliances from the entry point. Then they report the power consumption split into these buckets of appliances. Well, they cannot do it to all individual points, as some DNA of power consumption is indistinguishable, but they can do a fairly good job. (Is it my personal experience? No. I have not used it. Its right from the site and other reviews! But I intend to find out!)

Its available in India, and it can work with Solar panels also! Which means, they can report how the power is being used from the power generated on the Solar end of my supply! That is now the icing on the top. If it all works the way it is stated to work, I will be a happy camper!

Only time can tell!

Ray the remote

There had been universal remotes from quite some time. Some which needs us to map key by key and some which allows us to map using a device ID. There had been some with Digital display and some which were apps lying on your iOS/Android devices.

I have tried a few. Some worked fine with limited capability. Like the STB remote for the Satellite TV which allows me to map my TV remote also into it, and Universal Remote, a device from gear4.

The STB remote worked fine, though with a bit of effort, when I had the TV remote from which the universal remote could learn. But recently when I had to connect to a TV for which the Remote was not working anymore, I ran to a dead end.

The Universal Remote, Unity remote from gear4 would have worked well (even though the app was not very good) provided they had used WiFi in place of Bluetooth. Now the challenge is that the batteries get drained so fast and by the time you are ready to use it ,

I hear there are other remotes which work well, but end of the day I feel the flexibility lacks in a fixed keyboard remote as you have to have a lot of keys there.

This is the area where Ray is relevant. Ray tries to have some of the common functions as physical buttons as volume control etc and the rest all as soft buttons. It also tries to integrate some of the old Google TV into the remote. With support for many STBs including what is in India, they are making it extremely interesting for the subcontinent. So now you can see detailed program guide as well as additional information about the program. It can learn from your choices and suggest more programs for you. (Some of the wish list items I had in another post in this blog:-)

I also happened to see a demo given by Ray to recode which showed some stability issues with the remote which may be a deterrent if that slips into the final product. May be a little too early to start worrying about it.

In India especially the demography of people who watch the TV may find it a little too techie to start with, but if the device really simplifies the remote by adding snap shots of the program and name in native language etc, it can really be an interesting product to have. I will keep a watch on this to see if I want to get one. As I said earlier, a lot may depend on what Homekit finally grows on to be.