Neurio Home Intelligence Review: Adding smarts to ordinary appliances

[Shawn Knight]

As you’ve no doubt seen when browsing the aisles of stores like Best Buy or Fry’s, connected appliances often carry a price premium, but as with many emerging technologies and trends it may not be immediately clear if it'll be worth the extra investment. Furthermore, there’s little sense in tossing out a perfectly good oven or fridge that still has plenty of years of service left.

For the energy conscious among us that aren’t yet prepared to replace all the appliances in our homes, Kickstarter success story Neurio may be worth checking out. The pitch is simple: Neurio promises to add intelligence to ordinary appliances and make your home more efficient, all without having to install sensors on each device. It uses a power sensor with Wi-Fi capabilities to beam data about your home’s electricity usage to the Neurio cloud where it’s analyzed by the company’s pattern detection algorithms.

Aside from its monitoring capabilities, Neurio will soon be able to add a bit of intelligence to your existing appliances via compatibility with third-party systems like Particle (formerly Spark Core), IFTTT and SmartThings.

Read the complete review.

 

[theruck]

What exactly is SMART on this package? the same you will get if you put the product specs to an excel table. you will know how much each device consumes. so what? now you stop heating? or will the SMART neurio shut down heating when you do not need it?

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

Bah! This is for sob sisters who haven't trained their wives or chicks yet. Always marry a girl with small feet, that way she can get closer to the sink.

 

[wiyosaya]

So, this works completely only for a house that is totally powered and heated using electricity. Presently, it looks like there is no monitoring of natural gas usage. Without the thermostat add on, it seems like it would be of limited use in a home that gets some of its energy from natural gas.

For the electric home, it seems like the add-ons will only help correlate heating/cooling usage.

It also seems like the things you did to reduce your electric bill would have been more easily accomplished by following widely and freely available guidelines on energy usage. A programmable thermostat (even one that is not IOT enabled) would reduce heating draw at times when it is least needed, I.e., at night when asleep and during the day when the house is not occupied - and not to mention simply reducing the temp in your home.

It is also well-known that putting things like TVs, etc., on a switched outlet strip and turning that strip off when the TV (or whatever) is not in use will reduce phantom power draws.

To me, this seems like a glorified "Watts Up" https://www.wattsupmeters.com/secure/products.php?pn=0 from years ago, and that "Watts Up" has expanded into a broader product range.

Like "theruck" said, all the data can be gleaned from the product sheet of the electrical items you own. So for me, this seems like overkill.

 

[Guest]

Interesting, but http://www.wattvision.com/ also does the same thing, and it doesn't require an electrician to install. It does require you to have a smart meter, and to figure out which version of smart meter you have, but it does the same logging and notifying and pestering to lower your energy useage as well. I've been using it for about 9 months, and it works about the same.

The real innovation is that there are multiple concepts for IoT technology, and its getting more and more common. The future is going to be very interesting if/when everything is on IPv6. Exponential growth is not something most people really understand, especially when most menial jobs are automated, the people really need to read The Zero Marginal Cost Society.