I had been using energy monitoring plugs from a company called Plugwise for years. Then I saw the new Smappee Energy Monitor that magically and automatically discovers the appliances in your home based on their individual “power signature”. This all sounded great and I went ahead and ordered the device.

Installation and Setup

Installation was actually pretty easy. You place the smappee energy monitor close to your junction box or wherever the main power comes into your house. Then you just connect the smappee to power and fix two magnetic clamps around the plus and minus of the incoming power lines. The rest is done directly in the app which connects to your home wifi network.

Manually “teaching” appliances

The app has a “manual” learning feature which I was very eager to test out. It works like this:

Start the learning feature
Switch on the device you would like to add
Switch it off
The app tells you to do this several times until it has properly learned this new device

Sounds great ! Howerver, even though the learning cycle did almost always work flawlessy, the smappee never again recognized the device or recorded power readings for this newly learned device.

I contacted Smappee and they specifically told me that the manual learning feature should not be used…. Uhm – so why do they have this in there in the first place ?

Smappee App

I started with the Smappee 1.0 app which has since been upgrade to 2.0. With the version 1.0 I had put a lot of manual effort into ensuring that all appliances where being recognized properly and were also reporting the correct power usage.

You have to know that once you start using the Smappee monitor it takes about a week until automatically recognized appliances show up. In my case about a handful of appliances like our microwave, the fridge and several “heating elements” did show up. It took a lot of trial and error and days of manual fiddling to assign and rename the wrongly detected appliances. Usually it would go like this:

Smappee detects a second and third “micowave” even though we only have one microwave in our house
I would realize that the new “microwave” is actually one of our stove heater fields (our stove has four fields).
I would then go and rename the “microwave” to “Stove big field” or something similar

So this all worked great until the Smappee App Version 2.0 came along. With this new version my manually corrected appliances would be deleted by the Smappee algorithm and a day later another new “microwave” would appear out of thin air.

It’s a real shame because the smappe App does offer a lot of cool features:

Shows you the overall power usage
Shows the “always on” or “standby” usage
When it works – it gives you a great overview of which appliances consume the most power
Shows details per appliance
Shows historic information of your power usage

Verdict

At version 1.0 the product and the app were actually pretty great and pretty reliable. With the new version 2.0 I am not so sure anymore. I just received an email from the developers that the app has been updated and that many of the issues should be fixed. Time will tell to see if this is true.