DIY Kyoto Wattson 01 Review
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Decent green gadgets are few and far between, so it's with open tree-hugging arms that we welcome the excellent Wattson. This little glowing gizmo falls into a small but emerging category of devices dubbed 'energy monitors' or 'real-time electricity display meters'. If studies are to be believed, it'll save you between three and 15 per cent on your electricity bill -- a lot of cash if you're near the average £383 UK bill.
The device for the job is a table-shaped box, which wirelessly connects to your electricity meter and tells you -- in bright red LED numbers -- how many watts you're using at that second. For added effect, it glows blue when your house is using a reasonable amount of juice, jumping to red if you've left all the lights blazing, switched on the electric heater and fired up the electric oven.
Unlike its main rivals The OWL and the Efergy Meter, the Wattson is -- to borrow Zoolander parlance -- really, really good-looking. Eco gadgets generally seem to have skipped design school, but this one is well made and comes with a smart plastic finish. Size-wise, it's worth pointing out it's about the scale of a thick hardback novel rather than the full-size table it can look like in photos.
A blue glow indicates you're not using much juice, but it turns purple and then flashes red when you up your consumption
Getting started with the Wattson is easy. The supplied paper manual is clear, well written and nicely illustrated, and we can honestly say you don't need to be an electrician to fit the transmitter unit (and we're frightened of swapping out light switches). You simply connect it to one of the two cables coming from your meter and you're done. The only bummer here is that DIY Kyoto supply the transmitter with four non-rechargeable AA batteries. We'd prefer to see rechargeables, which would mean fewer resources and carbon expended making a replacement set of batteries.
In use, the Wattson is reassuringly intuitive. One button turns it on, and then that same button cycles through the different displays -- numbers only, colours only, numbers and colours, or a low-power night mode (just a very dull glow). It's worth mentioning the Wattson obviously does use electricity itself, consuming about 5w on average and just 1w in night mode. While that might not sound like much, it does actually have a very poor battery life, and won't last a day without being plugged into the mains. That makes it far less portable than its main competitor, The OWL.
Fortunately, cute touches compensate for the poor battery. We particularly like the way you physically tilt the Wattson to switch the display from technical kilowatt hours (Kwh, a measure of electricity used in an hour) to the number of pounds you'd spend in a year based on the electricity you're using that second (a measure anyone can understand). Living with the Wattson, we found the combination of handsome design, alluring light and tilt switch generally meant it was much more likely to be picked up by visitors than the The OWL and the Efergy Meter.
The final piece of the Wattson puzzle is its partner in crime, Holmes. This piece of Mac and PC software theoretically enables you to hook up your Wattson via USB and offload your last four weeks' electricity consumption and geek-up by looking at graphs of hourly, daily, weekly and monthly use. In the near future, the software will also allow you to upload your results to the web, a la Nike+iPod.
When we tested the software in 2007, it was extremely buggy. Since updates in January 2008, however, the Mac version works swimmingly -- although offloading's not as simple as plugging in your Wattson to your Mac, it is as simple as firing up Holmes and then plugging in the Wattson. With the Windows version, we could offload data but each time Holmes would forget our old data -- it only retained the last offload. Which, sadly, renders the whole exercise pointless. DIY Kyoto is working on fixes.
On ethics, the Wattson is virtually spotless. It's made in the UK -- a factory in Margate, Kent -- and designers DIY Kyoto are dedicated solely to making energy-saving products. No nasty side projects in weapons (hello Samsung howitzers) or human rights here (Alcatel, we're looking at you and Burma). The materials in the standard £150 version aren't particularly eco -- it's just plastic -- though you can buy a wallet-straining limited edition £350 Wattson made with green wonder-material bamboo.
While the Wattson does have a few flaws -- mainly the battery, the price and the software -- we're still seduced. It's the closest we've seen to a gadget that makes energy-saving cool, and it just happens to be beautifully designed and a cinch to use too.
Quality
Value
Ethics
Green
