EnerGrid

I was renting a flat in Buraimi as a student when the building moved to prepaid electricity. Paying an estimated amount up front each month became the rule, and the estimate was never right. The balance kept running out early, so I topped up again, and again.

One evening I was lying in bed watching a series and the power simply went out. Then the same thing happened again. Paying in advance for something and still losing the thing without warning is a particular kind of annoying, and the annoyance is where the project started.

A prepaid meter tells a household one number: how much is left. Where the rest went is never part of the answer. You watch the balance fall with no way of knowing whether the cost is the air conditioning, the water heater, or something left plugged in and forgotten a month ago.

So spending less becomes guesswork. Turn something off, wait a month, see whether the number moved. What we proposed was a reading in place of the guess: show the household what each appliance costs, and let the decision follow.

What we took to the camp was a full concept: a monitor for the whole home, designed to read each appliance in real time and put the biggest drains in front of the resident, with the hardware and the app to go with them. All of the concept was designed, and none was built.

My part was the website and the front-end prototype: the screens a resident would use, running on mock data. The numbers on them were invented rather than measured. No meter was read, no hardware was made, nothing ran in anyone's home. The judging was on the problem, the proposal and the case for both, which is what such a camp is for, and saying so is better than letting a concept sound like a product.

The entry placed 2nd of 20+ teams at the Promising Student Projects Camp, run by Riyada with the Oman Promising Startups Programme and held at Al Buraimi University College in 2025, with a cash prize and recognition from the Chairperson of Oman's SME Development Authority.

The project went no further. The prepaid meters are still in those buildings and still say nothing about where the money goes, so the problem outlasted the prototype.