ELIQ Energy Online: first impressions

Since we moved in a house, the electricity bill became something unpleasant that appears to worsen during the winter... The electricity company we have signed with, does not provide any detailed information about the consumption (except of a printed graph with the bill for the monthly consumption compared to the previous year) and the uncertainty to plan is a bit too sour to my inexperienced taste... Brief search on the NET brought me to the device I am using right now: ELIQ Online


Brief info about the product:
There is a wireless sensor that one can easily attach to the blinking LED on the energy meter.
The receiver needs to be connected to power and to your router to access Internet. The receiver collects the data and uploads it to a dedicated server. You need to create an account to access the collected data from your device. The provider is localized for Sweden (with interface in English and Swedish), that is suitable for the local market. The best price for the product I found at Kjell&Company.
If you provide more information for your household, you can get detailed comparison to similar households in 6 minutes and 1 day resolution interval.

You can setup details about your contract and the service will convert this to your current and estimated bill. Monthly reports are also generated.
The service also collects the outside temperature information from www.yr.no (Norwegian forecast service) and the indoor temperature from the receiver (you need to calibrate the indoor readings). It tries also to predict your final bill based on all this information - perhaps what I needed exactly ;-)

There is an online demo that you can try yourself (please look on the page since I am not sure that they will keep the link unchanged), but I have also collected some screenshots, at the end of this post, from my device after these couple of days it was collecting data.

First impressions:

• It delivers everything that I expected as advertised! 
• The Android app is useless but it also seems unnecessary - the web site is just fine (almost - some navigation are not touch screen friendly).
• One can export to Excel the raw data. CSV would be better perhaps.
• There is an API that can be used for more advanced projects. Just search and you will get some examples in php, python and bash...
• One can use more than one sensor - small companies could really benefit from this.
• More - later when I have more data to evaluate...

Some additional thoughts:

• I am a bit concerned with the situations when my Interned connection is down. In a post in the support forum, I found that (I hope I understood correctly) the sender remembers the data for up to an year /depends on the LED flashing frequency/ but no further details were provided. I am a bit suspicious that the sender is that advanced, although I can imagine a communication protocol that continuously sends old data together with the current values to recover the missing data.
  Update 2015.03.27: Inevitably it happened... I lost Internet connection for 3 hours and week later the missing data is still missing on the graph..
• I like solutions where the device can work without any online service support i.e. similar interface but provided by the device locally - I fully understand the complications related to this. If I rephrase it - essentially one pays (once) for the service provided by the company - the device itself is worthless without the online support! Seems fair.

Some preliminary conclusions:

• "ELIQ Online" seems like a perfect tool to monitor your electricity consumption, providing that your supplier does not do it already (Vattenfall.se has excellent customer page and services and you get it for free /perhaps included/)
• I have just confirmed that my heat pump is running as expected. I could get an estimate, in theory, what could be the largest bill for heating (31 days x 24 hours x 0.7kW x 1.1 kr / kWh ~   572 kr/month). Considering that my bill stats from 368 kr (subscription and other 100 fees) the heating from the heat pump is not that horrible. The spikes that are seen on the daily details snapshot are from the water heater. The ventilation, the router and couple of other devices contribute with constant ~ 130W, then I can almost see the old desktop and TV (the TV is "only" 150W - I need a new TV ;-) ). Fridge and freezer are barely noticeable on the background. The real kick is the old conventional water heating that can deliver/suck up to 15kW - this should be certainly noticeable, both on the graph and the bill.

The home page of the interface (kW) 

The home page of the interface (kronor)

Monthly details
 (the two curves are for the outside and indoor temperature)

Daily details

Current consumption

Monitor and notified bout selected events

Your household profile and electricity contract

Slides that are publicly available - for presentation purposes

Slides that are publicly available - for presentation purposes

Update: 2015.02.15
Everything works as advertised with small glitches with delayed reports or some sporadic service disruptions. Things can break, I agree, but they are dealt with some noticeable delay i.e. no fixed during weekends or after 17.00 o'clock /just my observation Update: this is incorrect. I can see that somebody is working on the current problem(it is Sunday)/. Another minor problem is the data for comparison. On certain occasions it contains extremely large values which changes the range of the plot and your data is scaled down to incomparable width.

Spike in the "similar household" data

It should be noted, until now, no data ware lost because of the disruptions. So, be extra cautious if you use the live values to steer some appliances at home.

Here is another review in Swedish: 3 månaders erfarenhet av Eliq elmätare

Update: 2016.02.08
It is really nice that one gets an e-mail when the battery of the sender needs to be changed...