Smappee energy monitor tells you exactly which appliance is eating up your electricity
Fix it to your meter’s main cable and it’ll swiftly learn to identify individual gadgets
Energy monitors are nothing new, but usually they’ll only tell you the total amount of electricity being used at any time, leaving you to work out which gadgets are causing your bill to rise to the GDP of a small Caribbean nation.
Smappee is designed to be much more user-friendly, because it’ll identify separate appliances and gadgets and tell you how much power each of them is using.
It installs much like any other master monitor (just fix its sensor to your meter’s main cable – or get a professional to do so if you don’t like the idea of poking wires under the stairs) but once that’s done it delves deeper than others, measuring energy oscillations every millisecond and thus identifying the individual signatures of each device in your home. Over time, it’ll learn the difference between your clothes iron and your hair clippers, allowing you to work out where your money’s going.
All the data gathered by Smappee is viewable as charts and tables through its companion app (available for Android and iOS), which also lets you manually name appliances and group them together as you see fit.
An extra way to save money comes in the form Smappee’s Wi-Fi-equipped Comfort Plugs. Set these up between a device and a power socket and you’ll be able to remotely turn it off. One Comfort Plug is supplied in the £170 Smappee box (available online or from bricks-and-mortar Apple Stores), or you can buy them in packs of three or six (£35 and £60 respectively).
Sam Kieldsen
Contributor