AlertMe SmartEnergy review

Accessing the portal the widgets on display tell you how much power above or below your Always On level you’re using. You can also view how much power you’re using above or below the average for the day.

Once you’ve told the service how much your electricity tariff is charged at per kWh, it can even tell you how much your house is costing you to run, breaking it down to the averages for Night, Morning, Day, Evening, helping you find out when you’re at your most inefficient.

The AlertMe portal lets you monitor power usage in your home and see how much electricity is costing you.

It’s this level of visibility that makes you think about how much power you’re using, particularly when you notice the Always On level. It makes you want to find out what’s using power and cut out everything unnecessary.

It’s at this point that having the wireless SmartDisplay is very useful, as you can carry it around your house unplugging bits of kit to see how much power they’re using. It’s possible to pretty quickly work out what’s drawing the most amount of power.

You can carry the SmartDisplay around to find out what’s drawing the most amount of power in your home

Plus, it’s neat to be able to see the impact of something like boiling a kettle. We all know that kettles draw a lot of power but when you see your home jump from 400W of usage to near-on 3KW, you really understand why you only want to boil the right amount of water.

The SmartDisplay typically takes around five seconds after a device is switched on to display the increased power usage, due to polling times. It’s a little annoying that the SmartDisplay displays things in kW, where as the web interface uses Watts, but it’s not a major problem. We like the way that the SmartDisplay can be switched from kWh to cost per hour, and you can cycle through cost totals for the current day, week and month.

An iPhone app (there’s currently no Android app) gives you exactly the same information, fitting the same-style web widgets on your phone’s screen. It’s surprisingly handy to have and means that you don’t even necessarily need to plug in or use the SmartDisplay. However, the display gives you the advantage that it has a thermometer built in, so you can measure your home’s temperature.