MiHome MIHO049 Monitoring Bundle - White

The Energenie monitoring bundle is a get you started kit, offering tasters of the tools available to monitor your home. I bought it mostly for the energy monitoring side of things (along with an energy monitoring smart plug they sell), rather than for the door/window and motion sensor included. At the time of purchase it was by far the cheapest way to buy the bridge and clamp meter for the electricity meter. I've only played with the motion sensor, if I didn't have Hue motion sensors on a couple of lights, this would be far more useful tool.As an energy monitor sadly it does miss the mark a bit for a couple of reasons. Although I have smart meters, one of the problems with the npower app is the lack of being able to see when the power was used, I get a graph of energy used per 24 hrs (having just moved to British Gas though their monitoring shows per hour, better but not great). Reading the blurb and documentation of the Energenie gave me hopes that I'd be able to see at what times of the day the energy was being used. But, there are two main problems with this kit, firstly for some reason that is explained in the documentation, the instantaneous readings of energy in use are too high by quite a wide margin compared to the Smart Meter we have fitted. At one point the smart energy meter read 310W, whilst the Energenie app told me I was using 468W, so it's not a good representation of usage, but you can use it as an indicator of high or low use, just don't rely on the actual values! Secondly, the biggest problem is the smartphone app and the granularity of readings, it's way too coarse, only showing changes per hour in the energy used. Every 10 to 15 minutes would be far more useful. Why? Frequently a lot of high power stuff is only a short run thing - kettles boil for a couple of minutes, so although high power (2 - 3 KW) the actual cost per boil is low (around 3p or so per boil depending on how full the kettle is) compared to something that is a low drain on permanently, say the power brick of the new Sony TV we have, which sits consuming 20W if it's plugged in even if the TV is off, no wonder they are called vampire power units! At 2019 prices that brick left on all year amounts to about £35 of electricity on a standard tariff. What I'm interested in is what the background draw of the house is and when, and for that, this device and app falls short, I can't easily see when the high load turns off and the low load is just running in the background, the graphs of the app smooth out the highs and lows.Where the Energenie does score is the expandability of the system, I've added in a remote controlled double wall socket to turn that bloomin' TV brick off, and the energy monitoring plug in smart socket seems to be more accurate in readings than the clamp meter, at least for low loads like the router and permanently on constant load stuff. At bit of judicious monitoring over a few days with the plug in unit and I've managed to lower the background current draw by over 150W when we're asleep, and by about half that through the day - so that's over £100 off the electricity bill in a year. The monitoring kit has paid for itself in a year, not bad. And the plug in socket has pointed out that it's time to change the fridge, compared to a friend's modern one, ours at 20 yrs old uses more than double the electricity in a year. Overall the monitoring kit is good, but it could be much better with just a little more thought in usability of the app and it's displays.