Toronto-based startup Valta is looking for Kickstarter funding to help it bring its remote energy-management system to life, in order to give homeowners complete control over power usage by devices in any home. It combines special socket attachments with a hub, iPhone app and web-based application to deliver energy waste monitoring, as well as remote control of unused devices sapping juice.
Valta works by combining sockets with built-in chipsets designed for energy management that can detect inert power vampires with an app that can receive push alerts for when energy is wasted. You can turn off the socket completely from your phone to save energy when that happens, and view which of your home devices are in a “standby” state, where they’re plugged in and consuming juice but not actively being used.
The system also uses geofencing to turn off gadgets when you leave the house and turn them back on when you return, which takes away the chance that you simply forget to do it on your own. You can also schedule power off and on events, like turning on the coffee maker or turning off your home theatre, as well as group devices together for easy management of a number at one time. Valta tracks all data and presents it via app- and web-based dashboards that fetch info from cloud-based servers, so you can see how your energy consumption is trending over time.
The Internet-connected v-Hub is what ties the cloud to the socket adapters to the iPhone and web apps, which plugs into your home router via Ethernet and can pair with up to 16 individual sockets. Valta also plans to release an Android app in addition to the iPhone app that will be available at launch, the company says. The founding team has lots of experience in hardware engineering, iOS and cloud computing programming and electrical engineering. They have the chops to pull this off, and now they need the cash, which is why they’re looking for $100,000 to get it off the ground.
Backer pre-order systems start at $139, which gets the v-Hub and three sockets, which is around $55 less than what Valta plans to charge at retail when it ships sometime around November.