True ‘Smart’ Meter Knows Difference between Your Fridge & Your TV

Another fun cleantech startup for you — Navetas. This company has a technology that should actually make your ‘smart meter’ smart. It learns about your home or building energy usage and disaggregates it so that you can see exactly where your energy is being used… in real time,… and it does so without any help from you at all. Not only that, the company contends that the price of its technology is comparable to that of conventional smart meters currently on the market.

Sensus, a smart meter giant, has reportedly now invested in and partnered up with Navetas. It has put £5 million ($7.9 million) into Navetas, and it now has an exclusive licensing agreement to trial Navetas’ smart meters in the US.

Here’s a little more detail on the technology:

Powered by ISE, our technology solution consists of advanced software algorithms running on a low power, low cost electronic hardware platform which can be integrated into a range of products. In contrast with other disaggregation solutions, ISE’s patent pending algorithms take measurements at a single point on the electricity supply. Utilising advanced signal processing and artificial intelligence techniques the system can then calculate the energy consumption of each individual device on the mains supply.

Crucially for a mass market device, the ISE technology does not require the installer/home-owner to teach the device about the house. Following installation, the system will automatically learn about the appliances in the house and calculate each device’s energy consumption without user intervention.

And here’s a video on the technology:

You can demo the device on the Navetas website.

“Navetas is already piloting its technology with three U.K. utilities as part of that country’s push to deploy home energy management systems to link up with the 53 million smart meters it’s planning to deploy over the coming decade,” Greentech Media writes.