Homey smart home hubs gain energy monitoring features
Image: Athom
Dutch smart home hub manufacturer Athom has added new energy-monitoring capabilities to the app for its Homey series of smart home hubs and Homey cloud services. The company also announced the new Homey Energy Dongle for European smart meters.
The energy-monitoring feature appears in a new Energy tab in the Homey app. It tracks data from whole-home energy meters, solar panel inverters, and energy-measuring devices—including the Emporia Home Energy Monitor, the Shelly Pro 3EM, and Athom’s own Homey Energy Dongle and displays that information in easy-to-read charts. Provide your utilities’ rates and the app will show you how much it costs to operate your home.
Euopean consumers can opt to plug Athom’s Homey Energy Dongle into their utility-provided smart meters to track their home’s energy consumptions. U.S. customers can use any of several alternative energy monitors from third-party manufacturers.
Athom
Used in conjunction with these and similar energy monitoring devices, Homey’s app can also identify which devices are consuming the most energy, and if you have solar panels, how much energy that system is generating. The app can track electrical (in kilowatt hours), natural gas, and even water consumption with a compatible meter (gas and water consumption are measured in square meters).
Armed with this information, Homey users can schedule events such as EV charging to occur during off-peak hours, when the electrical utility’s rates are the lowest. Users will also be able to automatically turn off high-consumption devices at peak times. The current version of the app uses manually entered utility rates, but Athom says an update that will support rates that vary by the hour—or even in 15-minute increments—will follow shortly after launch.
Athom’s own Homey Energy Dongle, for European smart meters outfitted with a standard P1 port, streams real-time energy consumption and production data over Wi-Fi to the Home Pro locally, or through the cloud to both the free and Premium tiers of Athom’s Homey Cloud. The Homey Energy Dongle supports electricity, gas, and, in select markets, water metering.
Priced at €39, the Homey Energy Dongle is available now.
Author: Michael Brown, Executive Editor, TechHive
Michael is TechHive’s lead editor, with 30+ years of experience covering smart homes, home networking, and home audio/home theater. He holds a BA in Multimedia Journalism, authored the book Desktop Video Production, and was awarded Best Online Review by the Computer Press Association. Michael built a smart home in 2007 and used it as a real-world product-testing lab. Now living in the Pacific Northwest, he is converting his 1890 Victorian bungalow into a modern smart home. Michael has worked at CNET, PCWorld, Electronic Musician, and Maximum PC. As a freelancer, he contributed to New Media, Camcorder, MacWeek, and more.
