NEWS
UK start-up AlertMe.com on Monday announced an agreement to test a service that will allow British Gas New Energy consumers to control their home heating systems from the web or mobile phone.
AlertMe makes a home energy-monitoring system built around a Zigbee home-area network. A cube-shaped hub acts as a central control point and separate devices, including smart plugs, communicate with the hub.
The British Gas trial, which is expected to be available by the end of the year, is designed to allow people to program their home heating systems to shave down their bills.
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People can view consumption data via a website and change settings from a mobile phone. For example, a person can turn on the heat remotely via phone or change the settings for when on holiday using a key fob.
AlertMe, which raised £8m in venture capital earlier this year, is developing a system for controlling home electricity use and home security systems as well.
There is a growing number of home energy monitoring tools to give people more detailed information so they can reduce consumption or control their appliances.
Rather than rely on smart meters as a communications gateway, AlertMe's hub connects to the internet and smart plugs transfer data to the hub.
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1. Simon Allen
Mr grandfather invented a system to do this in the late 1920s. Pity he didn't make a Patent!
He was an electrical engineer who wanted to make his life easier. When visiting the family house in Devon, he wanted the immersion heater to be switched on before they left London.
He connected 'stuff' (no one knows what) to the telephone line which was, of course, a manual exchange. Before leaving London, he rang the local exchange in Devon and got them to send a specific sequence of manual rings to the phone line. A kind of Morse code, if you like.
The box of tricks knew which ring was for the immersion heater and which was for the lights, if they were arriving late. I'm told there were three or four things.
When they lived in Surrey, he put a motor on the garage door and used the chain from my mother's tricycle to link it up. In order to activate it, he made a pneumatic strip on the drive out of an old bicycle inner tube, to trigger the motor.
He died when I was five and I always wanted to have spoken to him. He invented other things too.