OWL Micro+ CM180 Wireless Home Energy Monitor

Easy to install, instructions are easy to follow and guide is well described.What i dislike:* monitor display don't have option to be hang on wall* monitor display don't have back-light and if its placed on dark place will hard to be seen, a light need to go over display to be seen. [sunlight or any other source]* monitor display can be placed on angle when sitting somewhere, but only in vertical position, which limit its view angle if you place it at some lower position* monitor display don't have sound alarm* lag of temperature room monitorThe above listed are minor issues,[or missing features which we are aware before purchase it]but they don't affect the joy from the tool.What i like:* New model from 2012 [others OWL similar tools are from 2010]* 2 years warranty [others older OWL just 1]* build-in quality* more accurate than prevision models, +/-3%* clean and stylish design. compact and light.* has all kind of features that you can need to monitor and figure what's going on related to electricity where is installed* has bar monitor display, visual indicator [older OWL don't have]* has 2 user configurable alarms, one: when monitor current power usage for pick power usage. other when reach max total power consumption for a day. + when current power consumption[in real time] it will start blinking when reach the configured trigger point for max usage, and when become lower again will stop blinking, but will shows addiction "max" blinking text above the current power value, therefor you can figure that there was a power pick, and you can check its value when you press Up/Down, it will be auto stored for your review.* strong wifi signal with no issues even when it goes throw walls or other metal subjects.* power cord less for both monitor display and transmitter* detailed history info for about anything that's monitoredWith this tool you can monitor everything that you need,to figure how much it consume and how much will cost you.Very very handy and informative.Tested many electric units allready,how they work on idle, with half load, on full load.include notebooks, desktop PCs, air-conditions, and many many other different.Results from the monitor is very accurate.Note that it measures with step of 16.5Wso if you measure something with lower power consumption it may not react,depend of what level of this step is in.Monitor display is easy to be viewed even from different angles, if you have light on it,even from long distance 3-4 meters.[and maybe more]Highly recommend!

[Sorry for the long review but I felt it important to update my progress regarding the use of Solar PV- see end of review]I bought one of these to replace an old meter supplied by EON which I was convinced was over reading my power use.Installing it was easy and well explained although for some reason they put in the setup instructions at the end of the manual.Initially, the reading was a lot lower than my old EON meter but I decided it was too low. So I plugged in a 100W (incandescent) light bulb and it only registered a change of about 60W. So I went back and fiddled with the the clamp that goes around the main power cable next to the Official Electricity meter (it is quite a tight fit by the way). It obviously wasn't seated correctly because when I got back, the reading was something closer to 85W.I still wasn't happy with this so I had another read of the manual. I noticed that there was something in there about adjusting the voltage and I found my unit was set to a (default?) voltage of 230V. I don't care what Wikipedia says, I have always believed the mains voltage in England to be around 240V. To make sure, I measured it and it tends to vary between 239V and 244V. You can adjust the Owl to your mains voltage so I set it to 240V and then the figure increased to around 93W.I decided that this was within the 10% tolerance quoted in the manual and left it at that.During all these tests I discovered something else; that the Owl only updates every 6 seconds or so and sometimes it seems like a minute will go past before it changes. This may just be a wireless interference problem and it doesn't really affect the overall performance of the unit.I was pleased to see that you can actually set up a dual tariff reflecting the fact that many suppliers quote a higher unit rate for the first 225kW used in a quarter. I am still testing this to see if works properly and will update my review if I have any problems.In case you are interested, the EON meter was reading about 15% higher than it should. What I hadn't realised was that the EON transmitter has batteries in it. They had lasted over 5 years and were still going but once I replaced them both meters read almost identically (which is comforting).Overall, if you are interested in how much power you are using at any given time (and don't have solar panels) then this is a fairly inexpensive way of finding out.UPDATE (2 Aug 2013). I have now been running the Owl for a month and had two 'hiccups' with it. The first was when it measured a brief power usage of 9999kW( might have been 9995kW, I can't remember). I suppose this could have been a mains spike but nothing else in the house was affected (including the surge protectors which I thought were supposed to indicate when there have been voltage spikes).I wasn't really too bothered about this although it did screw up the historical data for power usage provided by the Owl. Then, about 10 days later, it stopped receiving data from the transmitter. In the end the only thing I could do was disconnect and reconnect the batteries on the receiver (I didn't touch the transmitter).Of course this meant that all of the setup had to be done again including all the tariff information. The good news is that after looking for the transmitter for about a minute, it found it by itself. So, at least you don't have to re-pair the receiver and transmitter every time you replace the batteries.UPDATE 2 (20 Aug 2013). I have now put in solar PV panels and the owl is behaving very strangely. It is difficult to explain but I know the house uses about 1.1kW just to 'tick over' so when the panels are generating around 1kW I would expect the Owl to be reading zero (or close to it). However, it reads about 700W. I even called the Owl support and they couldn't figure it out either (although they are going to look into it further).We double checked by looking at the 'real' electrity meter and sure enough, the wheel had almost stopped turning. We even tried turning off the panels when they were generating about 1kW and Owl immediately jumped from 700W to 1100W indicating that the house was drawing just over 1kW from the National Grid. Very confusing and unfortunately makes the Owl useless during daylight as you cannot tell how much power you are really drawing from the Grid'. Of course if you haven't got solar panels then I still think it is a great device to have around the home.UPDATE 3 (8 Oct 2013). Prompted by a comment on my review, I called 'Owl' again to see if I could make any progress with the Solar PV problem. Although they still couldn't explain why it was happening, this time I was told that the product is not meant to be used with a Grid Tied inverter. For that he recommended another product that they sell. I suggested that they should put a warning to this effect in their documentation but he didn't seem very interested. I might try their official solar PV unit but I am afraid I am still concerned that they couldn't explain why it is happening.UPDATE 4 (8 Nov 2013). I think I have got to the bottom of the Solar issue so I thought I would make a final update in case it helps anyone else in the same situation. I decided to read a couple of the Owl on-line manuals; specifically, the one relating to their Solar product. In it they refer to solar PV systems that are wired as what they call 'Type 1' or 'Type 2'.Basically Type 2 is where the output from the solar inverter feeds into your Consumer unit. Type 1 is where the output from the solar inverter is connected (effectively) directly to the Grid mains feed between the main electricity meter and consumer unit.Mine had been wired as 'Type 2' so I decided to get my electrician to re-wire it as 'Type 1''Et voila' the Owl now reads the correct house power consumption all the time (it is as if the Solar Panels are not even there). I have now put the Owl next to my wireless solar generation meter so that I can see at a glance how much power I am generating and how much power the house is using. A simple subtraction of one from the other tells me whether I have any spare to turn on the dishwasher! Hope this helps

I purchased this in order to get a bit more of a grasp on the electricity usage in my new house without having to faff about taking meter readings every day.However, unfortunately it would seem that faffing around taking meter readings is a far more accurate way of doing it.Firstly, I'll get the positives out of the way. It's a very well-made product with excellent instructions in very good, annoyance-free packaging. It certainly doesn't feel like a cheap Chinese special. It's an attractive little thing and will sit nicely on any shelf. It is very easy to set up and get going.However (and this is based solely on my usage), it is wildly inaccurate. I went to bed with most things turned off and the house "at rest" with it reading a current draw of about 380 watts. This sounded high - I would have expected closer to 100/150w - and thus I was going to investigate further.24 hours later, the unit has reported 10.3kWh of electricity usage. My electricity meter has reported 6.4kWh of usage. That's about a 60% difference! I know which one I'm more inclined to trust...If it was particularly cheap, I wouldn't be too fussed and I'd stick it in a drawer for posterity. But at almost £30 for something which is of no real use to me whatsoever, I'm afraid I am going to return it.Please note that this review is purely my own experience, and your mileage may vary. It could be due to the positioning of the cable clamp, or the proximity to the negative lead, but moving the clamp did not yield any different results. There is a setting to change the mains voltage (I verified it with a plug-in power meter) but this made no difference to the read-outs.