Just in time for Copenhagen, AlertMe launches Swingometer

alertme[UK] Timed perfectly to coincide with the Copenhagen Climate Summit, AlertMe has launched the Swingometer, a very simple visualisation tool that gives an overview of its customers’ home energy use.

The UK company sells a home energy kit and accompanying subscription-based web service that lets users measure and track their home’s energy use online by retrofitting hardware similar to so-called ‘smart meters’. The service also ties into Google Powermeter, the search giant’s own home energy monitoring tool, which opened its doors to Brits in October.

SwingometerThe Swingometer shows a live display of how well AlertMe customers in the UK are conserving energy (or not) by rocking back and forth as users increase and decrease their energy usage. It’s not really realtime, however. Instead, the Swingometer is updated every ten minutes and, as the company explains, “shows how the energy used in the past 24 hours compares with what we’d expect, based on past behaviour.” There’s also the option to compare regions via a ‘heat map’ which links through to a discrete Swingometer for each area of the country.

AlertMe is backed by leading clean technology investors including Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET VP, and Vantage Point, and in June 2009 announced an £8 million Series B round of funding bringing the total amount raised to £13 million.