BLOG #0007
UNSPACE INTERNAL PROJECTS: MORE ABOUT WHOLE HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT
A topic that has drawn interest in recent weeks has been our Whole Home Energy Management project. This project is multifaceted at its core, so we have decided to give a broader overview of some of the problems we see with home energy management and provide some of the motivations behind our investigation. We’ll also provide a brief glimpse into how we think beyond the status quo, enabling us to develop cross-cutting solutions to problems.
Background and Motivations
Over the past few years, rising energy prices have forced the average homeowner to seek solutions to mitigate added costs. While the cost of home electricity consumption was once a mystery until the bill came due at the end of the month, things have changed in recent years. With the advent of smart meters, some utilities have enabled consumers to see their consumption in near-real-time (for example, Texas). However, smart meters are designed to assist the utility in meter-reading, load-balancing, and grid monitoring, rather than designed for the consumer. These services only show the energy coming in and fail to consider efficiency of how the energy is spent.
To address this shortcoming, multiple products have come to market that have enabled end-users to gain more insight into their home’s power consumption. Products like Wiser and Sense tap into the main electrical panel enabling them to attempt to discern which loads are running, and when, through their power consumption signatures. To get a more fine-grained view, products like Emporia’s Energy Monitor and eGauge’s Energy Monitor tap into each branch circuit in an electrical panel and give the consumer real-time data for each circuit, but at the expense of attempting to identify individual loads. This is great to get data in the hands of consumers, but they require a knowledgeable consumer to install, make sense of, and then control their consumption enough for a noticeable effect on their electric bill.
There are fewer products on the market that give the consumer full control over their electrical panel. Products like Span and Lumin’s Smart Panel provide the consumer most of the data others do above, but also provide control of the circuits, and some automation as well. These products however can become too expensive for the average homeowner and still fail to address the bigger problem: not all energy waste is electrical.
The Problem
All of these products are geared toward a single energy source’s consumption: electricity. The same solutions don’t exist for other sources of energy (e.g. natural gas). In addition, they all require a knowledgeable and often expensive expert to install and then act on the data they provide. They also completely ignore that the data may show a problem which has many potential root causes, offering confusion to the consumer. This all stems from the fact that homes are a complex system of subsystems and components that are intertwined and often work against each other.
Homes are first and foremost a place where we live, sleep, and gather in comfort. An important part of comfort is the heating and cooling of these spaces - the air within our home must be a livable and ideally, comfortable condition. The HVAC systems that perform this work have competition of course: we need to heat water, cool food (pumping it out of the refrigerator), and cook, all of which provide heat to our homes. This directly affects the living space’s temperature, causing HVAC systems to work harder during the summer.
The unfortunate part of this is that each system is designed, built, and maintained separately, and no attention has ever really been paid to integrating these systems. Cooling our living spaces pumps heat out of them, but then dumps it outside the dwelling without thought to how it could be used to provide the other functions a home needs, such as heating water. In general terms, this is one of the major problems with home energy management: a holistic look at homes as a system has not really been done since each system developed independently over the course of the past 100+ years.
Thinking Big
When UNSPACE looks at these problems, we like to take a step back and think big. When we look at a home from a holistic perspective, it reminds us of a spacecraft. A spacecraft must provide a comfortable place to live, where fresh air is provided at livable temperatures and conditions. A spacecraft must provide hot and cold water to enable consumption. A spacecraft must have systems for storing, cooking, and disposing of food. However, with a spacecraft, we are forced to treat it as a single, closed system because it exists in a completely adverse environment. Homes do not need to stand completely on their own, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn things from their design.
When each of these subsystems was developed independently, they all made some assumptions about what inputs and outputs they had: for example a water heater needed an energy source (natural gas or electricity), a way to deal with the waste of this source, and a source / output for the water it was meant to heat. The assumption being that the integrator (home builder) of the system would be responsible for dealing with their assumptions: providing the fuel, exhausting the waste, etc. However, not much thought has been put into how we can make these integrations better, more effective, and more efficient.
Final Thoughts
At UNSPACE, we are investigating this problem from the top down. It’s not simply a question of tracking how much energy comes into the home and using the highest efficiency devices. It’s a more nuanced problem that requires more systemic thinking to design effective solutions.
We think big to identify the problems which have the most timely and prudent solutions. We work with partners wherever we can to connect the dots and create effective solutions. We work with out clients to do the same: when a client comes to us with a problem, we think big, then drill down and iterate rapidly to a successful solution.
