Home Energy Management
Posted 20/11/2012
Smart Appliances on display
Smart monitoring: There are lots of systems on the market that can monitor your energy use in the home. The Passiv system can monitor use when in asleep, in awake, out and about or on holiday and it can learn what you need and make up to 25% savings on your energy bill with no renewable technology at all. There are other options like the SSE iPlan, which you can upload to your laptop for analysis and / or the Current Cost system which feeds through to a web based graphic system. All of these systems can help you to get control of you house and show you where energy leaks or unnecessary background energy needs are. By monitoring individual appliances or by switching them on and off while watching the meter, you can identify the draw of an individual appliance and make adjustments to your system.
Appliance control: The advanced version of this gives the home owner control over their appliances and the option of subscribing them to a managed service where they can also be involved in short curtailment events ( turning down your lights by 10% for a short period or turning off the fridge for 10 minutes ). In doing so you are systematically relieving the grid of some of its load and if these “negawatts” are aggregated and traded by the “central brain” it can provide significant revenues and pass some of them back to the householder. Overall this is a great way of relieving some of the pressure on the grid while at the same time sharing some of the benefits with the local population.
The Game: There is a need to drive behaviours so we are looking at the implementation of a “funky” software interface whereby we put a “game” on the iPad / iPhone / Smart TV platform in the home which shows all the appliances and the loads and rewards good energy behaviour ( shifts from peak and reduced energy consumption ) with points.
The Rewards Scheme ( GREENback ): The points mean prizes ( that are better than money ) and will particularly reward the younger individuals in the house. The adults will benefit by reductions in their energy bills and the grid will have a more manageable demand.
©GREENprint
