On Friday I visited our technology partner SENZTEK to look at the smart devices they have built for home owners to use to understand and control their home energy use. All these devices connect to the Cortexo service and provide real demand side management; but there is much more! The smart hot water controller, that also acts as a hub or base for the Zigbee like Home Area Network (HAN), understand if there are solar thermal panels in the home and can divert extra hot water from the solar to say a spa pool or swimming pool instead of wasting it. Today there's an excellent article about SENZTEK's hardware in the New Zealand Herald.
I'm going to the Europe to see whats going on this month. I'm off to UK & Europe at the end of November to meet with clients and to understand how Europe is doing at the moment and where they intend to move with distributed power generation and smart meter use. It will be interesting to compare where they are to New Zealands approach.
Terry (Managing Director) and Jonathan (Director of Product Development) are currently at CeBIT in Hannover Germany on the New Zealand government trade pavilion. Interest in our remote monitoring has been high especially from providers of smart metering solutions.