Energy Reduction
We all have a role to play in the fight against climate change. The first step you can take in reaching carbon neutrality is reducing your home’s energy waste and improving energy efficiency. Homes that are energy-efficient use less energy to heat, cool, and run electronic devices.
Energy usage in homes.
Although the biggest users of energy worldwide are the industrial and transport sectors, residential sector is not far behind. The total consumption in residential sector has doubled since 1970s and it now accounts for 21% of total world energy consumption. Furthermore, studies show that more than half of the energy used in the residential sector is consumed by space heating.
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Source: IEA
The Challenge.
It is clear that for policy to succeed in supporting these potential energy savings, it will need to be underpinned by a strong understanding of human behaviour.
Helping households reduce energy waste through education and behaviour changes is actually pretty difficult. Many earlier energy saving initiatives failed to produce useful or long term results. Even the supposedly innovative solution of smart thermostats can’t provide evidence of actual energy savings over time.
Our Solution.
Why does it have to be so much effort to reduce energy waste? This inspired us to create the HubController: your very own super smart Automatic Energy Reduction Manager. For seamless integration into existing home heating systems, we designed the HubController to replace your existing smart (or not so smart) thermostat.
How does AER work?
Our AER technology is what delivers the majority of your energy savings by reducing the amount of boiler-on time through intuiting a households’ preferences even more accurately than a human! Then the HubController works in the background to keep your home comfortably warm, without needless energy waste in the process!
HubController Home Trial.
From 2017 to 2020, we collaborated with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) and collected real data from Irish households. Of the thousands of homes across Ireland who applied to participated, those chosen were provided with a HubController in return for their commitment to record and share their energy consumption data for the duration of the study.
The trial included 800 households using natural gas for heating. We monitored the energy usage of homes with a HubController (an AER manager) disguised as smart thermostat over 1 year. Next, we compared the energy usage of HubController homes versus homes without a happy hub. Finally, we compared the same household’s energy consumption in the year prior to HubController installation.
Independent verification
The overall design of HubController’s automatic energy reduction trial was independently overseen and advised by Ulster University. Additionally, the data analysis and results of this research were subjected to econometric analysis by PMCA Economic Consultants.
The Results.
Analysis of the trial data revealed that automatic energy reduction really works, showing a whopping 25% saving of total natural gas usage in homes with a HubController!
The research metered data was independently analysed and the final report highlighting the impact that a HubController has on household energy usage has even been published by SEAI.
In short, the findings shows that HubController:
- Saves an average 25% of total natural gas usage per year (36.64% in space heating energy use) and reduces an average of 1.77 tonnes of CO2 greenhouse gas emissions per year.
- This is about €717* in energy bill savings per household each year!
*Based on an average savings of 5,345 kWh per household and gas unit rate of 13.4 c/kWh
