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.

It just shows the power, being used and will display the unit cost of electricity and also the standing charge, which is a fixed unit of costs, you will also get a cost display of the units "The unit costs and the standing costs you must put in on settings yourself, which you will find in your bill under unit costs " ,used that day you also input the day and time which you can use to time when the unit displays in the day either all day or come on in the evening only . It's easy to install there's two units the transmitter, "which is the part you attach to your power supply " instructions will show you how to attach it. The second unit the display, will show the usage of all electrical devices and how much power is being used at anyone time "you can see which electrical device drives the display unit into the red " ,this second unit can be placed anywhere in the house were there's generally a main movement through the house so everyone can see it at a glance. The second unit can be plugged into any power outlet in the house that's the most convenient for you. The transmitter cannot be attached to the main supply the conventional way it uses a induction coil connection " that you connect from following the instructions that come with the unit " ,that the transmitter sends too the receiver as signals, it must have four triple A batteries , for it to work its not powered from the mains, but the life of the batteries is about thirty six months. Overall it's a good device if you need to watch your costs.

I have been using this for a month now and am extremely happy with my purchase. I have tried several energy monitors over the years but after initial satisfaction have been disappointed with them all, mostly they eat batteries at an enormous rate - a set a month in the case of two of the more popular makes. This little unit states it's battery life (for the transmitter only) of 2 years which is superb. The display is plugged straight into the mains and so is bright and very legible at all times. It is very easy to set up and if you take the trouble to go to their web site you can find how to fine tune the meter for greater accuracy. I let mine run for a week, compared to the main electric meter and applied a fine tune factor since when the unit is accurate to within 1 unit per week - outstanding! I has helped me track down a surprisingly high background power consumption of units on standby so saving money. You can see your consumption in all sorts of ways - power, CO2 and actual cost and since you can also feed in your monthly payments it will work out your daily budget and costs (including standing charge) and It becomes a fun challenge to keep the budget bar in the highest green area possible! Really impressed with the quality and design of this little unit. Highly recommended. EDIT January 2018. The original batteries on the transmitter are now flashing the "low" sign so they have lasted almost two years as promised. Well pleased with that!! And the meter is still doing a good job.

Easy to connect sensor, easy to set up. But after a while segments of the illuminated display have started to fade out. I have another of these meters, bought much earlier which is still displaying perfectly but this later manufactured one is a definite disappointment, beware….

This works superbly, really clear attractive graphics and a doddle to set up. I particularly like the fact you can add a standing daily charge separately on this one. Also it has a setting that you can tweak against a margin of error against the true meter reading, I monitored after 1 week usage and found it was about 10% over-reading so simply by altering the setting to 0.9 instead of the default 1.0 it now gives me very accurate readings when checked against the actual meter. It has made me tweak quite a few timed settings in our house on heated floors which were on when they just didn't need to be. Have also changed quite a few down-lighter bulbs and knocked off about 0.5Kw on lights alone. I reckon just with those changes I have cut our Elec Bill by about 10% so this device will pay for itself within just a few months. It scrolls through lots of comparisons against previous day/month etc and you can view it in ££ Watts or CO2. The monitor also updates instantly if you turn something so its in real time. Just buy it as you wont regret it.

Given the massive rise in energy costs I was really keen to get this installed. On opening it looked really good although the instructions were not very clear. Once I had figured it out I put it all together and went outside to fix it in the meter box - the first thing I noticed was that the clip didn't fit very tightly to the cable however I followed the instructions and plugged in the lead and removed the battery tab. On installing the screen in our laundry room, about 3 feet away from the sender unit, it wasn't receiving a signal. I tried it on various other sockets to no avail. The screen was showing CT connected but there was no incoming signal. I tried re-pairing but it wouldn't pair even when I eventually put both units together indoors. I tried switching off and on but the screen eventually locked up with not paired showing. Looking at other one star reviews I discovered they all say much the same thing as I had found. Amazon have accepted my return but Hermes haven't turned up to collect it yet (Due today) so just another day wasted.

I used to have an old British Gas monitor, which failed after a couple of years. I bought this as a replacement, thinking it would be much the same. It turns out that this is a much more polished product. The transmitter is big, connecting to the sensor by a wire and powered by AA batteries, as opposed to the expensive and relatively short-lived lithium cells used by my previous meter. The monitor itself looks good, and has a nice colour display that looks far more expensive than it was. My old monitor looks really cheap in comparison. Setup was dead easy, and it is very fast to respond to changes in usage and highly accurate in readings - turning on a 30w lamp results in a nearly instant reading 30w higher than before. Whether this product will last the distance is something only time will tell, but from what I've seen so far, it is a well-designed and thought out device - and one that offers fair value for money.