Everyone is using electric devices at home, think of kitchen appliances, solar panels, or even heat pumps. Most of these devices are working optimally on their own, but looking at the entire system, a lot of efficiency can be gained. That is where our solution ‘EnTune’ comes in.

EnTune is an energy management system that optimizes energy of entire households. It looks at all devices that produce or consume energy, collects their data, gathers external data (energy prices, weather forecasts), and defines an optimal energy strategy based on these factors and user preferences.

And our secret is simple: mathematics.

Using mathematics to save energy

Let’s have a look at two examples: the optimizations for domestic hot water, and the optimizations for floor heating.

Domestic hot water

Domestic hot water (DHW) is the heated water we use while showering or doing dishes. We optimize DHW costs, using mathematics, in three ways: cost function, dynamic energy prices, and usage patterns.

Normally, DHW is kept at 60 degrees. However, do we really need it to be 60 degrees? Since everyone is unique, we all have our own temperature preferences. One might experience discomfort if the DHW is only 50 degrees, while others might never use such a high temperature. That’s why we optimized it using a cost function, which measures the performance of a machine learning model for given data. It continuously looks at the chance of experiencing discomfort versus costs. With a higher setpoint temperature, the chance of discomfort decreases, but costs increase. And since EnTune users are asked to give feedback in the EnTune app whenever they experience discomfort, we can find the optimal balance in the cost function.

The cost function uses dynamic energy prices, and we simply heat the water when energy prices drop, and create a buffer for when energy is expensive. Thereby, we also look at consumption patterns. Over time, it’s possible to predict when a user needs hot water, and when not. When a family is always out during the day, it’s of course wasted energy to keep the water at setpoint temperature. And with that, our cost function can save as much as 50% of the costs.