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Ask HN: Would you pre-order GridSpy power monitoring?

• gridspy 17y ago
  Hot : http://gridspy.co.nz http://gridspy.co.nz Blog : http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/ http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/ Overview of our stack : http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors-to-browsers.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from-sensors...
• rscott 17y ago
  No. The price is exorbitant for what I would ever get out of it. People would not rather have this service than say, a new 42" HDTV and TiVo service.
  • gridspy 17y ago
    Cheers for your points. Greenies and huge power hogs only I guess :)
• seasoup 17y ago
  $950! It seems the only reason to buy your product is to save money by knowing my consumption patterns. That's ALOT of electricity I'd need to save to make up $950. Plus, are you going to save me at least $10/month? 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!
  • gridspy 17y ago
    Thanks for your honesty. 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.
    • seasoup 17y ago
      But once they locate that, why would they want to pay $10 month? After they have gone through the process of cutting down their $10,000 energy bill, what will they save with an additional $120/year? I think you might have some ideas around that, but you need a good story.
      • gridspy 17y ago
        Because most employees are lazy when it comes to power conservation. 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.
• waivej 17y ago
  Cost for me... I really enjoy our TED (http://www.theenergydetective.com http://www.theenergydetective.com) which aims more at a residential market. ($150 US) The instant feedback has been great for learning. The web interface isn't a big draw. 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.)
  • gridspy 17y ago
    Your point about Green cred and imbedded graphs is also where I see a major future selling point for our system. Interesting point about not wanting to see power usage online. Fair enough.
• noodle 17y ago
  the only way you'll convince me is if you can convince me that by paying for this expensive product and for the monthly subscription, that i will be saving money in the long run. and of this i'm not convinced, as a residential power user.
  • gridspy 17y ago
    Yes, Gridspy won't be convincing until it pays for itself inside a year. For a residential user, that means we need high volume manufacture to reduce prices first.
    • noodle 17y ago
      as an early adopter, i'd even be cool if we were talking 2 or 3 years, but i'm skeptical of even that, still.
      • gridspy 17y ago
        I think that you could find many more surprising power sinks in a large business than in a home - in a house you know exactly what you have purchased. In an office, there are so many people involved it is practically unknowable without monitoring, advance planning or a through (and expensive) audit. 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.
• waivej 17y ago
  I know a small data center (tiny) that might be interested for monitoring the air conditioners. Though that's a bit of a stretch and they probably wouldn't want to spend the $. 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.
  • gridspy 17y ago
    Yeah, I think that Business customers are the a major potential market.
• deleted 17y ago
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• stakent 17y ago
  Short answer: 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.
• jacquesm 17y ago
  relatively high ? $950 ?? That's not relatively high, that's simply overpriced. 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.
  • gridspy 17y ago
    $50 with no recurring revenue is well covered by lots of cheap, simple, inaccurate meters. See http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-monitoring-tools/ http://blog.mapawatt.com/2009/10/07/list-of-energy-monitorin... As a price example, here is a direct competitor: http://www.luciddesigngroup.com/starter.php 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/ 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.