What began as Janice Cheam’s student project at UBC’s Sauder School of Business has turned into an innovative new technology for transforming an ordinary house into a smart home of the future.
Dubbed “Neurio”, the technology is contained in a WiFi sensor that connects to your home’s breaker panel, tracking energy use by appliances and other electrical devices and integrating with the online cloud and apps, enabling homeowners to manage everything from turning down the thermostat when they leave the house to reminding them that they left the oven on.
Neurio just raised more than $267,000 on the online funding site Kickstarter, far surpassing its $95,000 goal.
I paid $129 to the Kickstarter campaign to be among the first consumers to get the Neurio Home package that includes a sensor and access to an online site with apps for managing power use.
According to Cheam, who is president and CEO of Energy Aware, the company she founded after graduating from UBC, and the creator of Neurio, using the technology can save homeowners much more than that amount by encouraging more careful energy consumption.
“We’ve found and a lot of studies have shown this, when people start to get real-time feedback on the way they use energy, it really changes the way people behave and how they interact with their appliances,” said Cheam. “At a very basic level there is just this consciousness that my house is actually costing me money right now.
“If I’m going to leave this house it is still going to cost me money, so maybe I should turn something off and save money while I do that. That positive feedback reinforces people’s desire to want to waste less energy.”
It worked for Energy Aware vice-president Ali Kashani.
Using a prototype of the Neurio in his Vancouver apartment, he cut his annual power bill from $750 a year to $400, an accomplishment that also earned him a $75 rebate from BC Hydro’s Power Smart program.
Among the power culprits in his home? A stereo amp that was set to demo mode from the store.
“When I started using the sensor, I realized even when I hit the off button it was still consuming energy,” he said. “It was costing me about $10 a month, and with a simple configuration change that problem was resolved.”
In the case of another family using the sensor, the software was able to determine that the household’s Saturday laundry chores were costing them much more than it should.
“One of the things we were able to detect really easily was that their dryer was really inefficient because you could tell how much energy it was consuming every time they ran a load,” said Cheam. “We could not only alert the customer to how much energy his laundry was using, but we were also able to compare it to the community and show him how much more his dryer was costing in power.”
Neurio uses algorithms to track power usage, and like the Nest Thermostat, learns over time. Neurio is online at www.neur.io
