Smart Energy monitoring with IOT
Should you are an energy efficiency company, a small electricity retailer, a small business or a large domestic consumer with solar panels for net metering, you are probably interested on energy consumption and metering.
Energy management is an obvious case of how data analysis can optimize costs, improve efficiency and save money. In this sense, European regulations have promoted the renewal of the electricity meter park by smart devices.
This has allowed hourly billing, a fairer model, since it charges based on when it is consumed, and it allows the variable energy costs to be passed on to the consumer. In this way you can take advantage of very cheap hours when renewables are at full capacity or reduce consumption when gas, more expensive, is the one who gives the cut price.
Depending on the country, it is already possible to access the meter information via the distributor. They all enable different websites where to consult the data. However, the information may be partially difficult to handle especially in real time (.csv files, etc).
In the absence of this, there are cheap smart devices, based on IoT, that allow data to be collected in real time and exported to any analysis SW. In addition, they have the advantage of allowing you to check whether the meter and the invoice are correct.
At tailored: systems we have developed a solution based on products on the market, using the Shelly EM smart meter (49EUR) and our IoTailor platform to collect, analyze and visualize the data.
Save energy and money thanks to IoT
To save money on the electricity bill, studying the consumption data is key:
- How does a consumer know what maximum power to contract? They may be spending more than the optimum or it is maybe a way to balance the consumption to achieve a lower peak power.
- How to manage consumption in real time in a practical way? Now it is more critical than ever to know how much electricity is being consumed ene very moment, specially in variable pricing tariffs.
To do this, at tailored: systems we have installed the Shelly EM smart meter (a wattmeter that allows you to connect via WIFI and send data via MQTT) in the customer’s electrical panel, and we have developed panels for data management.
The customer can watch:
- The current market price (variable price in this case)
- The global electricity consumption of the home
- The instantaneous expense in euros, as well as the accumulated of the day, month, year.
- The maximum power history per period of the tariff. In this way, based on the history, we can know what it si the optimum power to contract.
- Create consumption alerts, which are sent by email or SMS, to warn of high consumption in expensive hours, warn of excess power before the power control switch triggers.
- Alerts can also be generated when there is excessive consumption and there should not be (as an indirect alert of an occupation)
This represents an opportunity for:
- Energy efficiency companies that want to optimize their customers’ spending
- Small electricity retailers that want to improve and give more value to their customers by enabling the management of their data, in addition to better forecasting demand and saving on diversion costs.
- Businesses that want to reduce their costs and avoid power outages.
- Or any active and informed consumer who wants to save a few hundred euros a year.