Because of government regulations and high gas prices, more and more households are making the move to renewable and more sustainable energy. They switch their boiler for a (hybrid) heat pump, place solar panels on their roofs, purchase an electric vehicle, and sometimes even a home battery.
Challenge here is the unpredictable nature of renewable energy, which can impact both the residents’ comfort and energy bills. Plus the investments when making the move.
So, how to make this investment pay off? What if we can make all systems work efficiently together and anticipate on resident needs, to reduce the ROI time and maximize savings?
We developed EnTune: a smart AI-driven digital assistant that optimizes all home energy systems – to reduce energy costs, while maintaining the user’s desired comfort.
EnTune consists of a hardware device and a mobile app. The hardware device, a small IoT edge device called ‘the EnTune Edge’, needs to be installed at home and (wirelessly) connected to all energy systems. The mobile app (both iOS and Android) is developed using Ionic and Angular, and is used by the residents to interact with EnTune.
EnTune collects data of the dynamics and energy consumption patterns of a house, stores it in an InfluxDB time-series database, and turns it into a data-driven model of the house: a digital twin. Using this digital twin and other data sources, such as the weather forecast and dynamic energy pricing data, a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) continuously determines the optimal control strategy for the house. It simulates hundreds of scenarios, creates the optimal energy plan, and controls the energy systems accordingly.
Via the app, users can train EnTune to fully personalize it. The users give feedback on any possible discomfort they perceive, and EnTune continuously analyzes this feedback to better anticipate their usage patterns. Based on these patterns, it changes the optimization settings to take the users’ preferences into account for future optimizations. This way, EnTune always makes the optimal trade-off between the users’ comfort, energy costs, and sustainability.
Looking at one of EnTune’s early users, a household with a highly isolated home, EnTune managed to accomplish significant savings. Purely through optimizations, EnTune was able to significantly reduce the energy costs of this household by almost 30% in the first five months, resulting in an ROI time of 7 years instead of the original 10 years. And further optimizations are still going on.
Curious what EnTune can do for your monthly energy costs, ROI times, and ecological footprint? Visit www.entune.nl.