Powerhouse energy management system lives up to its name.

“Energy management” is the blanket term for what the many control, monitoring and reporting systems flooding the marketplace do for green-conscious homeowners or apartment dwellers interested in cutting their power usage, saving money and lightening their carbon footprint.

But what’s really going on under the blanket?

Massachusetts-based Powerhouse Dynamics, maker of the eMonitor home energy manager, says it can provide the answer.

“Other systems out there have historically told you, in real time, how much energy you’re using,” says CEO Martin Flusberg. “Having spent the last 20 years involved in energy management, from my view, telling the average consumer they’re currently using 3,000 watts is not very helpful. What does that mean? Good? Bad? There’s not a lot someone can do with just knowing that. That’s really what the first generation of these products were. Second generation, they talked about how they have plug-load monitoring and you may have seen things where they say they can monitor and control any appliance.

Well, when you look at it closely, that’s not accurate. The biggest energy users in the home are central air conditioning, pool pumps, hot-water heaters, and electric stoves” – items where plugs aren’t readily accessible.

“Your dishwasher isn’t,” Flusberg continues. “Your refrigerator may be, and I might want to monitor it but I certainly wouldn’t want to control it. So, there’s a lot of hype. But in fact, the things you’d want to monitor you couldn’t with plug load, and when you start to think about what you could, you begin to scratch your head. I could do my widescreen TV and my computer, but then I’m about done.”

Circuit Scrutiny

The Powerhouse Dynamics system monitors energy usage at the circuit level. “What that gives you,” explains Flusberg, “is a nice level of granularity to see what’s really going on.”

That’s just the starting point, Flusberg says. “The next step is providing the right level of information to the consumer, in an attractive, entertaining, fun way – and then helping the homeowner understand what it means and what to do about it. You might analyze the power usage level for a refrigerator, and then suggest that maybe it’s old, and here’s what you might save with a new one. You could analyze ‘vampire’ power loads; at the circuit level, we can actually see the pattern that suggests phantom load. That circuit in the living room is running all the time – even with the TV off.”

Early Warnings

The eMonitor system also offers a level of diagnostics that will tell the homeowner if, say, a refrigerator isn’t functioning optimally because of a faulty defrost cycle – or pre-empt a basement flood from a deteriorating hot water heater. “They have a tendency to build up sediment over time and crack,” says Flusberg. “We can spot that by seeing the energy usage, indicative of sediment buildup.”

Money in the Bank

The base system is $499 plus $189 for two years of monitoring, and is expandable. Monitoring is done through a data collection service that connects to the circuit panel, which, in turn, connects to the customer’s broadband service, through which data is uploaded. Everything is viewable on the Web through an intuitive user interface, and the customer and/or the integrator can sign up for both e-mail alerts or text messages for whatever issues they choose.

Flusberg says that the system can typically save as much as 30 percent in energy costs: “One customer discovered his hot water heater was costing $100 a month, replaced it, and saved $70 a month immediately. He was also able to get rid of $15 a month in phantom power; his bill was $300 before that. Someone else we heard about had two AC units and found that the smaller one was using twice as much energy as the big one, had it repaired, and is saving $50 a month.

“Another client discovered that a third-floor bedroom that was seldom used had heavy energy usage, and discovered that there was a space heater in there that kept clicking on every time the temperature dropped below a certain level; he saved $70 a month. Those are the kinds of things people are finding – things that are broken, or that they’re turning off because they had no idea how much it was costing to leave them on. People are even getting alerts about leaving on outdoor lighting after they leave for work.”

Peace of Mind

Right now, Powerhouse Dynamics doesn’t offer lighting control, but plans to roll that out in future, working with third parties, Flusberg says. Additional monitoring and control functionality is also being developed for thermostats and renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines.

Flusberg says the product’s appeal taps both into consumers’ worries about spending too much on energy and their desire to go green just for the sake of doing something that’s ‘the right thing.’

“It varies,” he says, “but the one thing we hear consistently is ‘I know I’m wasting energy, and it drives me crazy.’ It may not even be, ‘I want to be green,’ or ‘I need to save the money.’ As people learn about the alerts we provide, there’s a peace-ofmind feeling – ‘I’d love to have something that could let me know if one of my appliances is about to break’ – instead of finding out afterwards, which in some cases, as with a refrigerator, is pretty unpleasant. That whole ‘being in control of your home’ motivation is a very strong one.”