Blue Line Innovations EnergyCloud review: A simpler way to monitor your home’s power consumption

With electrical energy costs going up all around the nation, it is smart to monitor your home’s power consumption at a better stage than simply taking a look at your month-to-month utility invoice. While there are good options for monitoring utilization for specific shops, Blue Line Innovations’ EnergyCloud ($199) takes a whole-home method to the duty.

And not like the Sense Energy Monitor we evaluated earlier this yr, Blue Line’s wi-fi sensor doesn’t require entry to your home’s circuit-breaker panel to present real-time information about how a lot electrical energy you’re consuming and which units are drawing the heaviest masses. It attaches to your service-provider’s meter, as an alternative. The sensor sends readings to a second piece of {hardware}, which transmits these readings to your home’s Wi-Fi community and from there, to Blue Line’s servers within the cloud. You’ll use a cell app and/or Blue Line’s net portal to configure and monitor the setup.

A metered connection

If the thought of touching your utility’s power meter makes you nervous, relaxation assured you don’t want to do something harmful. Where the Sense product concerned putting clamps across the incoming high-voltage power strains situated behind your circuit-breaker panel, Blue Line’s sensor straps round your electrical utility’s meter utilizing an adjustable clamp. Blue Line says its sensor is appropriate with most analog and digital meters utilized in North America, together with good meters (observe this hyperlink for examples). I discovered probably the most difficult half to be aligning the sensor with the meter’s information feed, however the directions stroll you thru the entire course of and it isn’t all that tough.

Blue Line Innovations

The sensor runs on a single C-cell battery, and Blue Line estimates battery life at about two years. Over the couple of months I examined it, the battery life didn’t drop from 100 %. Given that it’s sending a meter studying to the receiver each 15 seconds, that’s fairly spectacular.

EnergyCloud departs from Sense in one other way, too: After two years, you’ll want to join a subscription if you would like to proceed receiving detailed evaluation. Fortunately, the price of the subscription isn’t onerous: $15 per yr.

I did encounter some hiccups whereas establishing Blue Line’s Wi-Fi module. Most importantly, I couldn’t get this part to join with my Eero mesh Wi-Fi router—in any respect. Curiously, it didn’t have any drawback connecting to any of the a number of typical routers I attempted, though I nonetheless wanted to dntal ft from my router, plus one flooring of elevation). I additionally found that Blue Line’s bridge was persistently unable to re-establish its connection to my community following a power outage. Ironically, I had to unplug the bridge and plug it again in once more to get the system to resume working.

Jason D’Aprile / IDG