Pilot Testing the Home Energy Dashboard – The PlanetShifter.com Magazine Interview with Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO – EnergyHub.net

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Pilot Testing the Home Energy Dashboard – The PlanetShifter.com Magazine Interview with Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO – EnergyHub.net

How Does it Work?

The EnergyHub Starter Kit consists of a touchscreen Dashboard and Temperature Control Unit. The two devices communicate using a low-power ZigBee wireless link. Automatically adjusting your home’s temperature while you’re asleep or away can be the most effective way of conserving energy, saving you as much as 30% on your heating and cooling costs. And unlike programmable thermostats, EnergyHub’s system is easy to use. The Dashboard also talks to your electric or gas meter to display your home’s total energy use (as long as your utility has installed a modern “smart meter” with wireless capability).

You can complement the Starter Kit with our Sockets and Strips. Plug them into your regular outlets, then plug in your appliances and devices as you would normally. The Dashboard receives the wireless data from the Sockets and Strips, configures appliances in each room, and organizes the information in a way that’s easy to read and manage. The system also recognizes devices that should always be turned on—like alarm clocks, refrigerators, or DVRs—and will not cut power to those.
If you already have a ZigBee-enabled “smart meter” in your home—provided by your utility—our system is automatically set up to communicate with the meter. If you don’t yet have a smart meter, we will provide a simple add-on to our system that measures whole-home usage.

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What happens to the home systems and environmental health of the inhabitants if the power goes out?

Not much changes compared with the scenario today. If a home loses power, the home loses power. In the future, it’s possible that many homes could have an energy storage device that could be used as backup power in those situations; or a home may have a generator that would serve as backup power. EnergyHub is designed to optimize a home’s use of energy; we are not an energy storage device or solution.

Is EnergyHub controlled by office computer, cell phone or iPhone app?

The EnergyHub solution is controlled by the touchscreen dashboard in the home and can be accessed remotely via the web from a PC or our smart phone application.

Is your technology and/or firm certified green?

Not yet. While there aren’t specific “green” certifications for our category of product, we're always looking for opportunities to “green” our product lines; The EnergyHub solution is designed to increase energy efficiency in the home. If used as intended, the system helps a consumer live a more energy-efficient, and thus greener, lifestyle.

There are a ton of unhappy PG&E customers with “dumbsmart” meters right now. How do you guarantee over all accuracy? What is the current warranty?

We depend on the smart meter for the whole-home power data; we can't guarantee that it's accurate, but the vast majority of smart meters have proven accurate. The bigger opportunity is in giving customers feedback on their energy use ahead of time--before the bill arrives in the mail.

The EnergyHub solution is currently in pilots with utilities and hasn’t yet been released for general availability. One of the goals of our pilots is to gauge and prove empirically what an average consumer can save on their bill with the solution. Many factors can influence what result a consumer can see in their home: the types of devices/appliances a consumer connects to the solution; whether or not they use a programmable thermostat; the type of heating/cooling a home utilizes; the age and type of building.

What exactly is a low-power ZigBee wireless link?

ZigBee is the communications standard that the utility industry has standardized on to facilitate communication in the home area network; it's embedded in millions of smart meters. Think of it as a simpler, more robust version of Wi-Fi for devices to communicate with each other. EnergyHub uses a low-power ZigBee radio in order to minimize the amount of power used by the EnergyHub device.

Who owns the Smart Grid? Will this become community property down the road?

There’s no one owner of the Smart Grid. The Smart Grid is a term for the type of infrastructure that utilities are building out now and will use in the future to deliver their services to consumer and commercial customers. Specific aspects of the Grid are owned by the companies who invest and deploy the technology to create that delivery channel.

Short Bio - Seth Frader-Thompson -

Prior to founding EnergyHub, Seth Frader-Thompson served in several managerial and technical roles at Honeybee Robotics, a New York-based company that builds electromechanical systems for NASA’s Mars missions and the Department of Defense. During his tenure at Honeybee Robotics, he worked on the Mars Science Laboratory mission, the Lunar Precursor and Robotic Program, and payloads and tools for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) robots. Seth was also the principal investigator for a DARPA research effort to build a miniature laser vision system for search and rescue robots. He has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado, where his research focused on Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS) for Ultracold Atom Optics.

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Connections –

Seth Frader-Thompson
EnergyHub.net
Info at EnergyHub.net