Ask HN: Would you pre-order GridSpy power monitoring?
It can monitor 3 AC circuits in your home or office and allow you to watch that power on-line. It measures "true power" and power factor. It can handle 3 phase power for industry.
Our device has a relatively high price tag attached $950NZD ($665USD). There is a recurring $10/mo subscription.
We have true live connections to the devices, and optional RS232 and RS485 ports - along with automation possibilities. We can also monitor a wide range of other sensors (i.e tank levels, gas / water flow, solar, temperature, humidity, air quality). We'll soon have a nice API and webhooks (HTTP POST back to your server).
I've been approached by several people asking when we are available, if we ship to the US, etc. We have a working product with stock, but can't send it afield just yet (testing still required). I'd be able to ship a preorder to you in perhaps two months.
If I built a pre-order portal to purchase Gridspy at a discounted price (say $400USD) with a promise to offer all new features as they become available and offer premium service for a low monthly charge - would you take me up on the offer?
If not, why not?
What automation tangent (new features) could we pursue that would convince you?
22 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 56.2 ms ] threadBlog : http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/
Overview of our stack : http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors...
But when it comes down to it, I don't want to have to think about my energy consumption, I don't want to compare charts and graphs and geek out on it. I just want to know how to use less without having to do more work.
That's from a consumer viewpoint, I have no idea what industry would think or want.
Good luck!
I hope that people who have $10,000 per month power bills can see the benefit of localising their power usage to a faulty air conditioning system or inefficient lighting.
Our price won't be suitable for homeowners until we manufacture in quantity.
They will install a GridSpy solution and discover that everyone is leaving computers and lights on all night. Then they send an email around saying "please turn off your computers and lights tonight."
The next morning, they look at their dashboard and calculate that they saved $40 last night, or $1,200 if they can keep it up all month. A week later, GridSpy shows that people are getting slack and leaving computers on at night again. Now management has real data to back them up when they point out how keeping up this behaviour is important.
Left to itself, power usage will most likely revert to the mean as people move back to their old habits, new employees enter, new equipment is added and so on. A continued installation should help to prevent this.
I imagine that commercial markets would be better for your product...especially in classrooms or companies that want to show off how green they are. (especially if it has really pretty graphics to embed into their website.)
Interesting point about not wanting to see power usage online. Fair enough.
and of this i'm not convinced, as a residential power user.
I think that our system will be much more compelling for home owners as the quantities go up, the prices come down and the features get filled out.
But, it makes me wonder if that might be good for other things like monitoring commercial refrigerators... especially if it could send alarms. I'm not too worried if my house draws a little extra energy...but if I might be worried if thousands of dollars are on the line if equipment fails.
Also, a business might have more people looking at the stats and more room to save $ with efficiency improvements.
For home use - no. Price is to high, subscription fee is show stopper for me.
Long answer:
Home use
Why will be home owner or tenant bothered by power use?
First group - people bothered by energy cost. The calculation is simple: the cost of hardware and accumulated subscription fees has to be recouped by energy cost savings in one year.
Yearly subscriptions fee $120, hardware cost, say, $200 gives $320 cost of the first year use of the service.
Energy cost $0.1 per kWh so we have to save at 3200 kWh per year to break out our investment.
3200 kWh per year means, if power consumption is constant, reducing energy draw by about 0.37 kW.
Doable, but is it easy?
Replace incandescent light bulbs by more energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs or led light bulbs. Done.
Is cost sensitive home owner the target group? He can be if the price is right. Read - low enough. So - mass production, lower cost per hardware unit, lot of subscriptions sold on ongoing basis. Well, there is one problem. Up front spend on hardware batch. And second one. How to reach these cost sensitive home owners? Marketing. Which means more money up front. Which means more risk. By the way, that means competing on price what is not the best idea for someone starting with limited funds.
Second group - people bothered by Earth future, global warming.
Each saved kilowatt hour means less about 2.3 lb (1 kg) of CO2 emitted to atmosphere. Saving 3 kWh daily during a year means about 1000 kg less CO2 emitted to atmosphere.
How reach people bothered by Earth future? It looks little bit easier. Is it easy enough?
Third group - early adopters, geeks looking for new gadget.
The new cool gadget has a little drawback. It is clipped on the electrical wires, presumably in the hidden electrical box. How to show it to other geeks? There is website with fancy graphs, twitter integration, facebook integration and, of course, iPhone application. And some game mechanics, a little competition: who has smaller energy consumption, who is greener so can be awarded by, say, more images of green leaves. Or bigger tree image. Or blue ribbon. Or ...
This group looks easier to target. It has another nice feature. Virtually all of them can be called linkerati, which leads to some nice side effects. Links, SEO, boost in visibility.
Industrial and commercial use
One 10 kW motor working all year long uses 86400 kWh. Let's assume energy costs $0.05 per kWh. Yearly cost: $4320.
Completely different game.
Industrial environment is harsh. Electromagnetic noise level is really high despite all countermeasures. Current in wires is hardly sinusoidal because of all theses nonlinear power receivers (eg. frequency converters).
What savings are possible in industrial environment?
Use less energy. Use GridSpy for ad hoc power monitoring during machine tunning. Possible for air conditioning, refrigeration, making compressed air, pumping.
Use cheaper energy - prices vary during the day and week. Locating low hanging fruit.
Do not pay for use more power than contracted. Add an ability to alarm someone if there is to much power drawn, allow to change the formula for power calculation. Example: power calculated as 15 minutes average or an 1 hour average.
Do not pay for too low power factor. Power factor monitoring and alarm someone.
Another beast is data reflecting production put on the internet. I know, passwords, vendor commitment to security etc. but ... Btw. this concern exists for home use too.
Despite that all energy conservation is an interesting field.
The price is high, as you mention - once we have an established cashflow with industrial clients and proven technology it will be possible to gradually migrate into the much more cost sensitive residential sector. To enter that sector from the get-go seems like a huge mistake to me.
Sure, the subscription fee is a showstopper. I'd like to have several levels of subscription:
Free: Live data online, 2 days moderate resolution (sample per minute) / 1 week low resolution (sample per 15 minutes) history. Simple embeddable widgets / twitter usage notifications, etc.
$6 /mo ($10 NZD): As free, 1 year moderate resolution, 10 years low resolution. Add Webhooks, SMS, email, alarms, budgets, etc. Premium: (this is for industrial, price TBD) 1 month ultra-high resolution (1 second samples), unlimited storage for other data.
Most home users would be satisfied by that free option.
As for your customers:
First Group (price sensitive domestic):
I agree. I'm not even attempting to reach this market right now.
Second Group (CO^2 sensitive):
I think that these users will be most interested in fostering power saving competitions within and between different businesses. Most of them have probably optimised the hell out of their domestic power usage.
They might be interested in leasing our system for a month to validate their power saving measures. If they have off-grid power, our solar integration might interest them.
Third Group (Early adopters):
The device itself isn't that sexy. As you mention, it is the online dashboard that makes it good. To reach this market segment, it is important that we have great integration with a wide range of other tech toys. I'd also like to make it really easy to hack together neat things using our live data via webhooks and the API.
I'm looking forward to the linkerati aspect. Hopefully we can foster a situation like Twitter - people linking proudly and prominently to their GridSpy Dashboard to prove their Green/Geek cred.
Industrial Environment:
Good point about the non-linearities in industrial circuits. Gridspy could be used to hunt down the poor power characteristics that cause industrials to be penalised by the power supplier. Because of our realtime data acquisition, we could highlight the power factor of motors during startup, running or shutdown. This would help electricians locate and fix key power issues.
As you mention we could be used to help cut power usage during certain times of day. We could also perform load-shedding - turn off AC while many motors spinning up for instance. The peak power usage during the day needs to be kept down to reduce power cost. Finally alarms and budgets could be used to attract attention to important issues.
All in all I'm pretty excited about our opportunities in the industrial sector. I think that the Residential sector is too disinterested and price sensitive to enjoy GridSpy.
and a recurring ???
I would not pre-order that until the price came down to what consumer electronics with this much functionality should cost, probably around the $40 mark or so. And that recurring billing bit for a feature that you could easily throw in for free is simply grafted on to make a spreadsheet look good somewhere.
Why on earth did you decide to complicate matters so much ? Your average consumer is not going to order these in quantities large enough to make it happen. A scaled down version that would cost $40 to $50 and that would simply monitor your electricity usage and report to a website (for free) so you can do your sampling using the simplest of pic chips would do wonders for energy savings and would be earned back in a foreseeable time.
Rule 1: keep it simple.
Don't break rule one.
Multiple hundreds of dollars are a completely different decision point than < 50, and as your volume goes up your costs go down further so your profits will rise. People visiting the site to see their stats and to compare their stats with other people in their neighbourhood (who gets to have the lowest electricity bill) would be a great way to create a community of energy conscious people.
There must be a better way to monetize that than to charge them for the privilege of supplying you with valuable data...
So, not 'more features' to sway people, less features at a much better price and a smarter plan to monetize your users in the longer term.
As a price example, here is a direct competitor: http://www.luciddesigngroup.com/starter.php
$10,000 USD up front, $2,000 per annum recurring.
And here is WattVision, which has the "all the benefits (and weaknesses) of a smart meter, available today" http://www.wattvision.com/
Also, GridSpy is far simpler than many competitors. If you are suggesting that we provide a device so you can create your own site to receive data, the creating a site part is not simple for 99% of the population.
Thanks for highlighting how we need to shift the language on the site so it is obvious it is priced for industrial power monitoring. Also thanks for your input.
If you want to know about the reception in that segment of the market then HN is the wrong place to ask, a gathering of captains of industry in the manufacturing or the retail end of things would be a better target.
I thought perhaps there might be some early adopters here interested in the data and how they could use it.
There are easy ways to meet captains of industry, chief among them power saving associations such as http://www.eeca.govt.nz/