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The EnergyElephant meter reading app is designed to allow you to quickly and easily submit your electricity or gas meter reading by just taking a photo of the meter reading. If you have an EnergyElephant account, we can then pass this onto your meter reading operator to make sure your bills remain accurate. In some cases your supplier will give you a discount for providing accurate metering data.
The EnergyElephant app uses your device's camera to take an image / photo of your current meter reading. By allowing access, our app can record the meter reading by simply allowing you to take a photo of the current meter reading. The reading is then extracted from the image and emailed directly to the user. The app also allows you to take a photo offline and to later access the image via the app for submission. This can be helpful when you have several meter reading to record and/or where the data coverage for your phone is poor or slow. Don't worry, we don't access any images unless you submit them via the app so your data is safe and secure.
The EnergyElephant app uses your device's location data to determine where your meter reading photo was taken either via the app or by accessing photos on your smart phone. This allows us to see where your energy data is being collected from. We use this to make sure we are matching the meter reading to the correct account, using the correct degree days information for your location, that any conversion factors used are appropriate to where you are using your energy (such as natural gas conversion factors from volume (m^3) to energy (kWh)), and other interesting energy related features. For these reasons, EnergyElephant (like lots of other apps) needs special permission to access your camera and photos. Apple's privacy settings for photos are separate from location services, so the app will simply ask for permission to access your photos. In either case, the app will not be able to upload photos to your EnergyElephant account unless you OK it first. You are more than welcome to upload images without location data, but we will not be able to use the advanced location services mentioned above without this data on your account.
Understanding iOS Location Services For information such as how to tell when an app is using location services, steps to reset or change your location settings, and to learn more about iOS location services, please see Apple's Understanding Location Services support article. Apple's API reference For iOS developers or highly technical readers, check out Apple's Developer documentation to learn more about the API library EnergyElephant uses to access iPhone and iPad photo galleries.
If you're experiencing ongoing technical problems with your EnergyElephant iPhone app, you may need to reset the app from scratch by deleting and reinstalling the app. Doing this should reset your settings and resolve most usual technical errors. Don't worry, uninstalling will only remove the app and its settings from your iPhone. Your EnergyElephant account won't be effected and the data in your account will be safe and sound on our servers.
To reinstall, simply search the App Store for EnergyElephant or visit the EnergyElephant website from your web browser.
If the EnergyElephant mobile app freezes or crashes for some reason, give these actions a try:
If you are still having problems please contact us and let us know what's happening.