geo Minim Energy Monitor - Self-Installed - CT Clip Sensor for Single Phase Electricity Meters

I, like many people these days I presume, am seeing my electric bill rising year on year and this year I decided to act. After hearing all the stories about supplier installed smart meters and how they fail if you switch provider I decided to buy one that would work on any supplier and this is it. It's relatively cheap, easy to install and set up just follow the quick start brochure that comes in the box. The monitor is easy to read and gives a lot of data that you can use to start saving or even reducing your carbon footprint. I'm up in Scotland living in an old Granite house and I just had my monthly standing order raised by my supplier to £160 my central heating is oil fired and I realised that my annual electricity bill was getting out of hand. There is an information leaflet that comes with the monitor that explains your various appliances and how they run in the background (Fridge, central heating, broadband hub etc.) and also warns you about the energy hogs like the kettle, Immersion heaters and instant showers.The first thing I did was to set up the monitor with my tariff (you find this on your normal bill) which includes your daily charge (somewhere between 18p to 30p) and a Kw/hr charge again in pence. Once that was plugged into the monitor the next thing was to set up my £ budget entry so I decided to use £100 per month which if I could stick to would give me a saving of £60 every month. The monitor then did the maths and went to work showing me on one simple screen my houses usage in real time (about 500 watts/Hr) set against my budget usage for the day (20Kw/hr). These numbers also have a speedometer style visual which goes from green into red when I exceed my real time Kw/hr allowance against my budget. It's brilliant. As the days go by I can easily scroll through the screens to see how I'm doing via recent history, monthly and annual actual usage totals against my budget.I have had lots of fun with it as it is so sensitive it even picks up the minor wattage increase when I plug my phone in to charge. It's really quite astounding to try various appliances and watch the speedometer rise slowly or rocket into the red zone! My kettle uses a whopping 2.9 Kw when it's on but I have a four litre electric dispensing urn that only uses 600 watts to boil which then lasts the whole day for coffee and the like with only 20 watt top ups to keep it at 97 deg. The kettle is now firmly in the cupboard. The microwave uses about 1.5Kw and the instant shower a massive 9Kw. So it's short showers from now and if I want to luxuriate I'll have a bath as my boiler only uses 600 watts.So far I'm easily on target to slash my bill as the background load in my house sits comfortably at 480 to 750 watts of background usage and that's with the fridge, lights, TV and central heating (oil) system, 3 security cameras and a PC or Playstation running. I have marked everything as 5 star apart from the accuracy because I will need to see if my bill matches my monitor usage when it next comes in. If they both say the same usage then I'd happily give 5 stars across the board. P.S. I'ts also worth replacing most of your house lights and halogen outdoor security lights with LED light fittings which only use a tiny amount of electricity. In my mind It's worth the £38 just to find out which appliances and when you use the most juice to see if you can change things around to save you money. If I stay on target then I'll have saved £720 in one year - fingers crossed!

I really like this monitor and, like other reviewers, have found it to be quite addictive! We’ve had it about 6 weeks now and I am still checking it several times a day, and finding the comparisons between days and weeks very interesting! The display is very attractive and easy to read with day / week / month historical data too. A really attractive monitor which is also easy to operate, and only took about 20 minutes to set up (once you have your rate and standing charge ready).We used to have an energy monitor in the kitchen which was very useful but it stopped working so I replaced it with another, different type, however that one was badly inaccurate - about half the actual reading that the previous monitor had said! (all different makes) and there was no point having one which was so unreliable so we went without for a year. But I really missed having one.Then we moved house, expecting our electricity usage to be very similar really, but found that it was about 45% higher than before! We were horrified and had to do something. So I stumbled across this energy monitor and snapped one up quickly! It proved invaluable and showed us what was using the most electricity. With a few adjustments (and replacing two energy-hungry items which we intended to replace anyway, including the plasma TV) we have now got our electricity spend down considerably and it’s now about the same as before so we’re delighted with that! We couldn't have done that without this monitor to help. We do still have high usage items but they aren't easy to change (eg. electric hob, having previously had gas) but our adjustments have balanced that out it seems!We have now got the monitor in the lounge as that is closest to the electricity meter which is the other side of a thick wall, about 4m away – however I did initially plug it in in the kitchen which was through a few more walls and about 8/9m from the meter and it picked up fine there too.One thing I would say though, it seems to over-estimate the electricity usage compared to the actual meter by about 14% (as per both readings for September). This is unfortunate, but being aware of that helps and I would rather it was over-estimating than under, then our bills should be lower than expected?! Also the room temperature gauge doesn’t seem to be accurate and is usually 2-3 degrees lower than the other three temperature gauges we have at home (all of which are very similar, so they can’t all be wrong!).But all in all, a great little gadget which we wouldn’t be without and is very useful helping us keep an eye on what we're using! It has certainly paid for itself and helped us enormously to manage our electricity usage in a way which is positive and helpful! Very pleased.