Make ‘Sense’ Out Of Your Electric Bi...

Ever wonder what the details are behind your electric bill?

Every month you receive a bill from the local power company. Sure it tells you how many kilowatts you consumed. What it doesn’t tell you, is what is consuming all those kilowatts.

You have a general idea that turning stuff off saves electricity. What you may not know is what in your home is consuming the most electricity.

If you are paying the utility bills for your rental property, wouldn’t you like to know what parts of the building are costing you the most money?

Even if you aren’t paying the electric bills, would it improve your advertising if you could tell prospective tenants (or homeowners for a flip) that your property has the lowest electric bills in the neighborhood?

Big Data Comes to Small Homes

In order to know what equipment in a property is consuming the most electricity, you need some data to analyze.

‘Big Data’ is what more and more businesses are trying to gather to run their businesses better. It’s ‘Big’ because computers these days can track an unbelievable amount of data, analyze it and present it in a format from which decision-makers (you?) can quickly see ways to improve their business.

A tech company is bringing this kind of ‘Big Data’ monitoring to your home. It’s called ‘Sense.’ Sense has produced a small orange box that retails for $299.

You take the box and hook it up to the electric panel in your home or apartment building. Then let it run.

Sense operates off the idea that every piece of electric equipment in a building has a distinct ‘signature’ in terms of how it runs. Sense can (pardon the pun) sense those different signatures. Then it figures out which signature is which piece of equipment (lights, dishwasher, etc.) and starts monitoring them for usage.

The founders of Sense worked on speech recognition technology for Apple’s Siri and some other virtual assistant software at a company called Vlingo. Now they are applying what they learned in speech recognition to ‘electricity recognition.’

It determines those signature levels by reading incoming power levels to the building about a million times a second. Pretty wild.

It can take as long as a month for Sense to figure out which piece of electrical equipment is which and start providing accurate monitoring of each one.

Once it’s figured out which equipment is which, Sense feeds data to a cloud-based monitoring system. You simply download the Sense app (Apple or Android capable) and see the data in real time like a newsfeed.

Here is a video overview of how the Sense monitoring system works. And here’s a video of how the Sense App works.

Big Brother Is Watching Your Big Data

While the data from your building can be useful to you, it can also be very useful to larger insurance and utility companies. Sense retains the rights to the data so they can aggregate it and sell it.

The ultimate goal of Sense and these big companies, though, is to have the homeowner monitor their electricity and use it wisely. Homeowners can receive feedback of the large data aggregation to help do things like:

Figure out which appliances in general are costing the most electricity
Determine peak power usage times more exactly and shut down heavy users during those times
Align household usage with better solar power usage (Sense can track how your solar system is doing if you have one)
Alert you to something such as an attic fan, which may be unnecessarily running all the time without your knowledge

As a landlord, it is difficult to convince tenants to shut down their appliances during certain times of the day. But just as with a flip homeowner, most tenants would appreciate a landlord who can give them tips on saving electricity.

Sense is partnering with Green Mountain Power in Vermont to run a trial program in the town of Panton. Based on the data collected from these tests, the utility companies can provide better ideas to the residents on how to save power.

It’s the same thing landlords can do, just on a smaller scale for their residents.

Electricity and other utilities can account for a significant cost in a real estate investor’s budget. As technology advances, it will become easier and easier to monitor the investor’s buildings, and take steps to reduce or eliminate the costs. Sense is a good step in that direction.