Home Energy Management Technology – Rich Green @ Xerox

Every thursday Xerox Parc has these great lectures on scientific topics. Today Rich Green from Rich Green, Ink spoke on current developments in home energy technology. Rich is a long time custom audio/video installer, and big honcho in Cedia, the professional installers’ association. The installers have branched out over time from just setting up stereos into total home automation which brings them to the green stuff. Some of this transition has been forced as improvements in technology have rendered a lot of the stuff you used to need a custom installer for into every day technologies. I found it funny that he gave the standard custom installer pitch that this stuff is dangerous unless you hire a custom installer to do it. (I suppose as head of the association he has to do that!).  But like my fancy remote control for my stereo also is not generally sold retail, only through installers because it’s too hard for the public to do it. Of course, being a trained engineer (sic) I had no problems programming it. But anyways.

To the topic at hand.  There were a couple of interesting points. First, simply making people aware of power consumption, reduced consumption by 12%. This is probably true, but only works with that half of the market that cares. About 25% of the market doesn’t care at all, and another 25% is not price sensitive and simply requires a certain level of power.  Second, a lot of technologies for doing Home area networking, and having computerized wireless (zigbee etc) control over lights, hvac, blinds, appliances are already practical and effective. Newer hotels using this stuff are getting around 28% power savings. Another interesting idea is that you can save quite a bit of power by turning the refrigerator off at night – it does stay cool on its own. (I wonder about the ice cubes melting a bit and sticking together though….)

At least for the high end homes he designs, these technologies are totally practical and available. Control4 in particular makes nice stuff. You’ve got a wall plug adapters, light bulb adapters, wireless motion/sound occupancy detectors, dimmers,  all remote controlable,  user interfaces flat panels, and central switching devices. The switching device is cool – it takes ethernet, wifi, zigbee, i/f, rs232 and outputs via a web server to an external display. It enables you to view and control every in the house according to complex schedules.  For anyone who enjoys a sophisticated automated environment this is really cool. I’m definitely interested and seeing if I can do some of this at home. He also showed off other cool devices like the Wattsup web enabled power mesuring plug and the PS Audio PowerPlay 800 web enabled power conditioner.

A more interesting question is about moving this stuff downmarket. He admits most of his installs cost 10-100K and go into top of the line monster houses. For them there is a good ROI because they’d be using expensive equipment anyways, and the energy savings will be considerable and will have a payback. And in Silicon Valley hitech bosses both can afford and appreciate this stuff.  The challenge though is to make it affordable for people buying more basic appliances and who don’t care about the gadgetry. If you’re buying a $10000 worth of kitchen appliances, an extra $800 to automate it is ok. If you’re buying $1000 worth of stuff, it’s not. Also many people are somewhat apathetic to the finer points of control.  So how to reach them? The answer has to lie somewhere along the lines of the ipod – a minimum of controls, but great power because it simply does the right thing on its own.  Simplicity will drive the price down, and make it more appealing to more people.  So there we are – how to achieve that ?