A new government funded scheme to put electricity consumption monitors into Australian homes will rely on electricians to do the installation, writes Graeme Philipson.

The program is called ‘Our Green Home’. It is one of 30 projects running under the Australian Government’s Low Income Energy Efficiency Program (LIEEP).

The Our Green Home platform was developed by Australian software company Object Consulting. It has two key components – a device to monitor household electricity consumption and a web-based software platform that allows users to look at the electricity consumption by accessing a dedicated website.

There is no in-home display, and the device is not a smart meter. It is a monitoring device (a CT meter) which sits inside the meter box and connects via a 2-pole DIN rail slot. It monitors the premises’ electricity consumption and sends the data through the home’s WiFi system to the Our Green Home website. A small ‘energy hub’ plugs into a port on the home’s WiFi switch.

The project is being managed by a consortium led by industry group Sustainable Business Australia, and funded under the LIEEP program. The consortium has an agreement with NECA to invite interested electricians to install the monitors in users’ premises.

The monitors were developed and are supplied by Australian company Saturn South specifically for the project. Each device continually monitors the energy usage inside the device, sending data to the Our Green Home cloud engine, from where participants can view their consumption data through a secure website exclusive to their household. They can also view the data through a tablet or mobile phone.

Data is updated continuously so households can use the web site or the mobile app to view their current usage in real time, as appliances are turned on and off. They each have their own unique Our Green Home profile, and may choose their own personal friends, action plans, and action groups. This enables them to share their energy consumption data with specific friends in the Our Green Home community, but for privacy reasons nobody can access any premises data unless they are explicitly permitted to do so.

The partners in the consortium are Sustainable Business Australia (project management), Object Consulting (the Our Green Home platform), Connection Research (data analysis) and Apex (community involvement).

“Our Green Home offers a unique approach to lower residential electricity bills by providing a real-time visibility of energy consumption through an innovative online energy efficiency platform,” says Object Consulting CEO Gerry Carroll.

“It is designed using state-of-the-art, proven and sophisticated energy monitoring technology currently available.”

The project includes an important community involvement, feedback, monitoring and evaluation component. Australian market research and consulting company Connection Research will provide independent feedback and analysis of the success of the program outcomes.

Our Green Home was selected by the Government to be part of the LIEEP program on the basis that the consortium believes the best way to help low income households in the face of constantly increasing electricity prices is to provide them with an innovative and engaging energy monitoring tool that will help them to learn their energy consumption, predict their energy bills ahead of their arrival, identify energy saving opportunities and assist with tracking their progress.

“Users of Our Green Home will have a new and powerful way of learning in real time what using various electrical appliances really costs them, how efficient are those appliances,” said Carroll. “It will also help in finding the most efficient ways to reduce electricity bills.”

Typically, 10-20% of the energy in any household is wasted. Our Green Home gives households an interactive tool for finding and eliminating this wasted energy and saving money on their energy bills. This is all the more important given the expected large increases to the prices of electricity over the next few years.

“Consumers already expect an itemised phone bill, yet still pay their energy bills without having a smallest idea of where it all goes,” said Carroll. “Similarly, just as one can look up mobile phone usage at any given time of the billing cycle, it is natural to expect a similar way of finding out how much a household has spent on energy and what the upcoming energy bill would look like.”

Our Green Home collects energy data in real-time, so the effects of turning on and off appliances are visible straight away. The platform keeps the history indefinitely, allowing users to track their progress in reducing energy consumption and calculate cost savings. It also assists with choosing the most appropriate energy tariff to suit the needs of a particular household, based on their historical up to 10 seconds consumption patterns.

As this is an Internet-based platform, it has a number of advantages over the conventional IHD (in-home display) technology. These include:

• Ability to view the current and past energy consumption from anywhere, using a secure login and password.
• Ability to share and compare energy usage with friends or neighbours who are also using the tool. This has been proven by a number of research papers as a key driver for changing behaviour.
• Ability to create a personal action plan for saving energy and track progress.
• Ability to keep historical consumption data unlimited for the purpose of tracking the energy use over years as well as to assist with choosing the most appropriate energy tariff.
• Ability to discover eligible grants and incentives.
• Ability to collect energy usage data in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

According to a major study conducted by Connection Research, a typical low income household spends on average $1,500 on electricity each year. Low income respondents are more likely to have lower electricity bills, but not significantly so, especially when the higher proportion of single adult families is taken into account. That means electricity bills represent a much higher proportion of their total income.

The project brings knowledge and skills from leading Australian product, technology and service providers in the environmental sector together with part of the Australian community that is eager for greater informational, educational and practical understanding on leading more sustainable jobs, industries and livelihoods. It is from this desire to create sustainable communities and support local business enterprises that this application is made.

The monitor was developed by Australian manufacturer of energy monitoring technology Saturn South. It feeds data to a cloud-based application, built as a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. Unlike a conventional smart meter, the devices collects and publishes energy usage in real-time (every 5 seconds). They are Internet-enabled, and are independent of any specific energy retailer.

This solution is fundamentally different to smart meter technology in a number of ways:

• It provides visibility of energy consumption near real-time, every 5 seconds (as opposed to every half an hour for smart meters), thus allowing for a much more immediate and engaging user experience and ability to monitor individual appliances through access to a very granular energy usage.
• The data collected on the platform remains the property of the users irrespective of which energy retailer they use.
• If a household relocate to another property, their historical data is kept and they can continue use the product and compare their current usage to the historical usage.

Our Green Home also collects analytics and metrics and stores them centrally for analysis. This allows for an understanding of the system usage and can be used for evaluation of the overall popularity of the trial.

For more information see the Our Green Home website at http://ourgreenhome.com.au/

If you wish to be one of the participating electricians installing the monitors, please contact Object Consulting on (02) 9459 3300 – Fiona Lines at fiona.lines@objectconsulting.com.au or Andrei Bobylev at Andrei.Bobylev@objectconsulting.com.au