Ali Kashani lived in a small apartment, but he had big heating bills. The culprit, it turns out, was a broken heater in his bedroom that was eating up about $50 a month worth of electricity—even though it wasn’t giving him any heat.
Kashani is the CTO of a startup called Neur.io, and he discovered this phantom heater with the startup’s flagship product: a device plugs into a home’s breaker panel and monitors electrical use. It can work in just about any house or apartment, giving you a detailed look at how much power all your appliances and gadgets actually consume.
“The wires that run through every wall look like a nervous system linking all these appliances into a single place,” he says. “Except that today we don’t have any intelligence in the center.”
Using the product, Kashani noticed a few other problems, such as a stereo that was using electricity even when it was switched off. All told, he says, he cut his electric bill in half. But the company has bigger ambitions than just rooting out energy wasting appliances and gadgets.
It can also send you a notification when your drier is done running, or when you’ve left your house with the oven on. Much like Bidgely, IOTAS, and Habitat, Neur.io is trying bring to deliver on the promise of the “smart home” to people who don’t own houses or can’t—or don’t want—to replace all their appliances with internet connected versions.
‘Completely Reversible’
Staring today, the company is selling the device to the general public. At $250, Neur.io isn’t exactly cheap, but it is less expensive than retrofitting your home, and if you’re like Kashani, it could end up paying for itself in a few months.
Most users, he says, are able to install Neur.io themselves. “It doesn’t require an electrician but if someone doesn’t understand how to work with live wires we recommend they get help,” he explains. “It doesn’t cause any changes to the panel. It’s completely reversible.”
Once connected to your electrical panel, the company’s software guides you through a process of identifying your appliances. Basically, you’ll walk around your home turning things off and on and trying to zero in on what’s using the most power. It’s at this point that you’ll probably identify the biggest power guzzlers.
Neur.io also uses machine learning algorithms to identify different types of electronics in your home based on their unique electrical finger prints—and more importantly, it can notice particular patterns of usage that allow its apps to send you alerts when something is out of the ordinary.
The Robotic Butler
The technology was initially built by the device—which was originally called Energy Aware—for utility companies. But Kashani says he hired about three years ago to bring the technology directly to consumers, letting them take direct control of their energy use—and create new applications for these ideas.
Kashani says the company is now working on partnerships that will enable its software to take a more active role in automating your home. It may soon be able to tell your thermostat to turn down the heat in a particular room if there are no lights on in it, or let you use services like IFTTT to create your own custom actions.
For Kashani, it’s the first step towards a home that can meet your needs, not unlike a robotic butler. “We’ve had this image of humanoid robots serving us tea for a long time,” he says. “But in reality, what’s happening is that the devices we already have are becoming consciousness of their context and environment.”
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