Traditional energy monitoring meant a certified electrician wiring up current transformers — slow, costly and error-prone. We built the Lighting Logger: a compact, magnetic-mount IoT sensor that non-technical staff deploy in minutes, engineered to a $20 unit price.
Full Stack Energy partnered with an energy-efficiency solutions provider to transform energy monitoring in commercial and industrial settings. Traditional current-transformer (CT) systems required extensive installation by certified electricians — costly, inefficient and error-prone. We innovated the Lighting Logger: a robust, IoT-enabled illumination sensor, competitively targeted at $20 per unit, that non-technical staff can deploy in minutes. It cut installation costs by 30% and was nominated for the 2024 IoT Impact Award.
Traditional energy measurement uses current transformers (CTs) that have to be installed by certified electricians. For the small and medium businesses the client served, that meant every deployment carried the cost, scheduling friction and potential for inaccuracy of an expert install — often making monitoring uneconomic for exactly the customers who’d benefit most.
The constraints were demanding. Existing alternatives either lacked essential features or were cost-prohibitive, so the objective was a high-quality product at a competitive $20 per unit. It had to avoid expert installation entirely, achieve extended battery life and reliable signal range in a compact, durable design, and finally be accessible — earlier solutions lacked intuitive interfaces.
In short: take energy monitoring from an electrician’s job to something anyone could stick on a wall — without sacrificing accuracy or reliability.
A $20, self-install target shapes every decision. We built the hardware, the deployment tooling and the data pipeline around it — and iterated hard against real pilot feedback.
When you design to a $20, no-electrician target, every milliwatt of battery and every millimetre of the enclosure is a decision. The constraint is the product.
Lead Engineer, Full Stack Energy
The Lighting Logger cut installation costs by 30%, empowering non-technical staff to deploy devices within minutes rather than scheduling an electrician — and delivered reliable, accurate real-time energy monitoring that reduces operational downtime. Its versatility opened new opportunities across diverse industries, including manufacturing and large commercial facilities.
By enabling significant energy savings through precise real-time monitoring, it appealed to environmentally-conscious stakeholders — and the work was recognised with a nomination for the 2024 IoT Impact Award. We continue to work with the client to evolve the product and bring their vision to profitable reality.
The $20 price tag is the whole story. It sounds like a marketing number, but it ruthlessly disciplines the engineering — the chip you pick, the battery budget, the enclosure, the radio. Hit it and you unlock a market that CT-based monitoring priced out; miss it and you’ve built another product nobody buys.
Designing the deployment around QR and NFC was the quiet unlock. The hardware being cheap is meaningless if you still need an electrician — so making it something a non-technical staff member installs in minutes is what actually cut the 30% off the cost of ownership.
The Lighting Logger is a compact, IoT-enabled illumination sensor engineered to a $20 unit price. It replaces current-transformer metering that needs a certified electrician — non-technical staff magnetically mount it and deploy it in minutes, with up to ~1,000 ft transmission range.
Traditional CT-based monitoring carries the cost and scheduling friction of an expert install on every deployment. By designing the device for self-installation — magnetic mount plus QR and NFC field tools — the Lighting Logger removes the electrician from the equation, cutting installation costs by 30%.
Yes. It samples at precise one-minute intervals with cyclic redundancy checks guaranteeing data integrity, and adaptive power-saving algorithms extend battery life and durability. The design was iterated against real pilot feedback and was nominated for the 2024 IoT Impact Award.
Designing to a hard price and a no-expert install is exactly the kind of constraint we thrive on. Let's build the thing that ships.