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iPod team lead founds company to make home energy management sexy

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The former head of Apple’s iPod Division, Tony Fadell, left Apple and founded a company making… thermostats.

No, really!

In January of 2010 Apple launched the iPad and I wrote a post here asking if Apple could make home energy management sexy. I speculated that because Apple had lodged patent applications for a Home Energy Management system, their iPad rollout would be the perfect platform to deliver it on. For whatever reason, this never came to pass.

Why is it important? Well, heating/cooling makes up around 50% of the energy used in a typical house – that’s a lot of energy/money/CO2.

Why is it necessary? Well, traditional thermostats are analagous to VCR’s in the 1980’s. Remember the flashing 00:00 you used to see on them? That was because they had an appalling user interface and almost no-one could figure out how to set the timer on them.

Well, the situation is not much better for today’s programmable thermostats. As I wrote in this post last year:

Thermostat

Thermostat

Look at the thermostat above. This is the thermostat to control the central heating/air conditioning in my home. I like to think I am reasonably technical. I have been a Windows sysadmin for a multi-national company, managing Windows, Exchange, Active Directory, ISA and SQL Servers. I edit php files regularly, I remotely manage my own CentOS server via SSH and I?ve even done quite a bit of regex scripting of .htaccess files!

But this thermostat is beyond me!

I know it has a timer, so it should be possible to set it to come on and off at pre-arranged times. Should. Getting it to do so seems to require a Stephen Hawking-like intellect. And, even if I did manage to figure it out, it is so unintuitive that the next time the clock goes forward (or back), I?d have forgotten again and would need to start over! Which begs the question, if my phone knows when to change its clock forward or back, why doesn?t the thermostat ? but I digress!

This is far too much hassle entirely. So I don?t use the timer in my thermostat. Or any of its functionality (apart from on/off). And I?m far from being alone in this.

Home energy management systems have, to-date, suffered from having appalling user interfaces. Consequently, no-one uses them.

Well, that’s about to change – as the video above demonstrates, the Nest thermostat not only has a simple iPod-like interface, it also learns your schedule and automatically adjusts the temperature settings to match them. Furthermore, when connected to your wifi, it can be adjusted remotely via phone, iPad, or browser – forget to turn off the heat/aircon when you went out shopping, or coming home early from work? No prob, open the Nest app on your phone and adjust the thermostat remotely from there!

The device also takes account of local weather conditions in its algorithms. It downloads firmware updates and it maintains a history of your use so you can see how your behaviour affected your energy use.

This does, indeed, seem to be a very cool device (pardon the pun) and one which sorely needed, which leads me to my main gripe with the Nest – it is only on sale in the US.

Here’s hoping they start selling them outside the US very soon.

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Google, Microsoft, shutter their home energy management offerings

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Google PowerMeter

Last week Google announced that it was shutting down its PowerMeter application (a screenshot of which is above). A couple of days later Microsoft divulged that it was closing its PowerMeter competitor, Microsoft Hohm.

This is very disappointing because the two products were decidly disruptive and, as Google mentioned, studies show that having simple access to energy information helps consumers reduce their energy use by up to 15%. Both services cited lack of uptake as the reason for their termination.

In Microsoft’s case, there is a very good reason why this was so, it never opened up Hohm beyond the US – if you only allow 4% of the world’s population access to your application, you can’t really claim to be surprised if you don’t see significant uptake.

PowerMeter though, in its announcement said –

our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service

Why then did Google’s PowerMeter not scale, despite being open to all comers?

Simply because Google were too early to market, I suspect.

CurrentCost

CurrentCost

Being a trailblazer meant that getting data into PowerMeter was not trivial. The only way to make it easy for data entry would have been if Google managed to sell its services to utility companies but Google had very little success with this approach. Why would utility companies allow Google access to their customer usage data? That was never a runner.

The alternative was to use a device like a CurrentCost – an in-home energy meter which had the ability to upload its data to PowerMeter. However, as I detailed in this post, there were multiple problems with the CurrentCost meters which meant they were never a reliable option for PowerMeter data entry.

Obviously, if you can’t get your data into PowerMeter, it is not going to be of much use to you.

The need for real-time energy information is obvious. It is very difficult to identify wasteful electricity practices when you receive your consumption information (i.e. your bill) up to two months after you used it.

So what now?

Well, it looks like we are back to getting this information from our utility companies. Things are changing (albeit at a glacial pace) on that front though. As I mentioned in my post on Centrica’s Smart Meter Analytics implementation, the technological barriers to rolling out a compelling home energy management have come way down.

Now if utility companies actually roll out energy management applications properly, we could see significant reductions in wasteful energy use.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Can Apple make Home Energy Management sexy?

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Apple iPad

Will Apple move into home energy management, and if they do, can they make it sexy and front-of-mind for everyone?

I made this point in a reply to a post earlier on the IBM Global Eco Jam and I thought it could well do with being fleshed out to a full post here to see what others think.

In case you were hiding under a rock yesterday, to tremendous fanfare and hype, Apple launched their latest device, the iPad.

The extremely desirable tablet-like iPad is aimed squarely at the home user market, what with its base price of $499, its beautiful form-factor and its concentration on music, video, games, etc.

While you probably did hear about the iPad, you may not be aware that Apple has lodged a patent application for a Home Energy Management system, joining Google’s PowerMeter and Microsoft’s Hohm.

Apple’s application talks of using powerline communications to control appliances’ energy consumption around the house.

Unlike Google and Microsoft though, Apple have an amazing track record of making sexy devices/applications. If there is anyone who can make home energy management sexy, it would be Apple software running on the iPad.

Let’s hope they make it so – what are the chances?

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Jonathan Gay, CTO Greenbox, talks home energy management

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With Google’s announcement of their PowerMeter, home energy management solutions are really going mainstream.

With that in mind, I wanted to have a chat with Jonathan Gay, the founder and CTO of Greenbox (not CEO as I said in the intro – d’oh!). Greenbox have been one of the pioneering companies in this space and they sell their energy management solution to utilities for rollout to the utilities’ customers.

Smart home energy management solutions are going to pivotal to the rollout of successful demand response programs – if my home energy management solution can interface with my appliances and have them respond to dynamic energy pricing information according to rules I set, then demand response will play a significant part in reducing our energy footprint.

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