At home with plogg

Electrical equipment is an integral part of our home environment, providing information, entertainment, convenience and comfort. However, rising energy prices and concerns over carbon emissions are waking everyone up to the cost of all this.

At Energy Optimizers, we understand that sacrificing convenience or comfort is a last resort for most people. On the lookout for less painful ways of cutting back on energy use, we developed our Plogg Blu smart meter: a simple, unobtrusive plug-in device that transmits kilowatt-hour (kWh) and other power consumption information wirelessly, via Bluetooth, to a to PC, laptop, smart phone or PDA.

Plogg Blu can be plugged into each power socket around the home in turn, monitoring individual appliances, or groups of appliances plugged into a multi-way adaptor. Instantaneous power data shows how much appliances cost when in use, while logs over time can uncover hidden costs such as machines left powered up or on standby when not in use. Energy data is presented intuitively and graphically on a PC or mobile, empowering homeowners to adjust energy use patterns for maximum economy and minimum lifestyle disruption.

This is only the beginning for Plogg in the home. Plogg’s advanced feature set includes the ability to monitor electricity produced by “renewable” microgeneration technologies, such as photovoltaic solar panels, small-scale wind turbines and hydroelectric generators. Energy Optimizers is committed to working with power companies to help homeowners that generate their own electricity to monitor and sell any excess back to the grid at a fair market price.

Smart energy metering is on its way to homes all over the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government has announced that it will require all households to switch to smart meters by 2020, on the way to implementing a nationwide smart grid infrastructure. Plogg technology helps homeowners to get ahead of the curve, understanding their energy use patterns and finding new ways of using energy more efficiently.