Last year, a brand new home in Palo Alto, Calif. was outfitted with new technology from a little-known company called Agilewaves. Day by day the devices installed within this home collected data on the energy consumption of the major utilities—water, gas and electric—and how it was being used in the home. The homeowner was able get real-time reports on where, when and how energy was being used and whether it was being wasted or saved. So impressed was Agilewaves’ first, real-life user that he became an investor in the company.

The pages of Luxury CE have been visiting the topic of energy conscious products and “green” living quite a bit lately. It should come to know surprise; skyrocketing energy prices are the mother of invention. But Agilewaves was formed before all that began, in 2006 
by a group of engineers. Some hailed from the IT world, others from the custom integration world and some who even worked on data and control systems for NASA.

“We were paying attention to, and had worked on, atmospheric science and saw climate change as the key issue facing humans right now,” says Peter Sharer, Agilewave’s CEO. “And we thought: how can we apply our experience to that problem?”

So he and his colleagues took their experience with monitoring, control and data acquisition and combined that 
with IT in order to apply it to buildings, which, according to Sharer, is where 40 percent of our energy is used and, by association, where 40 percent of carbon dioxide is produced.

“What we built was a resource monitor that gives real time feed back on electricity, gas and water,” explains Sharer. The first market they wanted to reach was the high-end residential sector, figuring that was a natural starting point, since home owners are always concerned about conserving energy—if not to be eco-friendly, then to at least save money. “There’s a lot of research out there that shows that real-time, detailed feedback can lead to 15 to 20 percent, or even higher, reduction in consumption and therefore carbon dioxide production as well,” he says.

By 2007 the company was able to deliver its first system to the Palo Alto home and have installed seven other systems since then. Some are residences, another is in a school and a ninth system is going into a commercial installation. Because of the rather open architecture of the company’s technology it can easily be applied to residential, institutional or commercial projects. They are also in development talks with high-rise luxury condominium developers who are looking for systems to help keep energy costs down.

From the beginning the company knew its monitoring system would have to work well with existing control systems and so they kept the system architecture open enough to be interoperable. By using a simple API module, the monitoring system can work with just about any control system on the market. One of the first partners to be officially announced was Crestron. The Miller Design Company in Woodside, California was the first building to complete an installation, using the Resource Monitor and Crestron. But Agilewaves has also been working with AMX on solutions, as well as Control4.

HOW IT WORKS

Collin Breakstone, Agilewave’s vice president, believes there is a hole in the home automation market. “What has never existed has been the ability to directly and proactively link a consumer’s, home owner’s or building owner’s lifestyle preference with their control system,” he says.

What makes this technology so unique is that it not only monitors energy 
usage but can also, with the help of a control system, automatically dictate changes in energy usage, if preset thresholds are met.

The Agilewaves resource monitor is both a hard and software solution. The hard ware is made up of sensors, integration boards and a data acquisition center. The sensors are placed in-line with the home’s gas, electric and water systems. The information is transmitted and collected by the integration boards; stored by the data acquisition center; and aggregated to the home control systems information displays. “The data can be pulled from our system freely and be used by the end-user or by the integrator to incorporate into their control system or their user interface,” explains Breakstone.

“Essentially there is a head-end and cabling that goes to nodes. More often then not, the sensors will co-locate in a mechanical room,” he says. “There is a small enclosure, which has our proprietary integration board in it—that’s where the sensors land. That is connected to our data center, which usually lives in the control system rack and connects to the network via CATV.”

Overtime the information is collected and behavioral patterns can be analyzed. “We’ve developed a proprietary database storage methodology that allows us to keep a backlog of six years of data on about 20 gigabytes of space,” says Breakstone. “Our accuracy is approximately to 0.5 to 1 percent. It is an intensely detailed, granular 
amount of data.”

The analytics can be extremely specific, aggregating data into the various zones, rooms, or even as specific as to certain appliance, gas points, faucets or water heaters. Through a number of different ways to access that data, users can pull it up in reports such as trend analysis and comparatives.

“The end-user can then set and establish thresholds, as well as durations of time periods,” Breakstone describes. “When a certain threshold is met, exceeded or approached, it sends a message to the control system to affect an actual change. At the same time it will send an e-mail or text message to the end-user, or someone on the site, that a threshold has been approached or exceeded.”

Sharer further explains, “In the resource monitor you could set a goal for yourself, say a monthly goal of producing only 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from energy consumption. You would do that by setting a ‘watch.’ The resource monitor would then watch the trend of the consumption. As it approached that limit, an action could be set (using the control system, like 
Crestron) so that if this message is sent, then lighting consumption is cut back to 80 percent. The system would then take that action.”

The monitoring and control can be set for an almost innumerable number of monitoring metrics, from kilowatt-hours to temperature to gallons per month and beyond. It can also calculate carbon emissions. The user or integrator can configure just about any actions, so long as the home control system is set up to execute them. “Depending on the home, one needs to be able to assign the values,” says Breakstone. “If you have 10 lighting loads in your kitchen, for example, that are high-draw, that may be the first thing you want to dim…maybe it’s HVAC for a guest wing.”

“In addition to monitoring the inpidual flows of electricity, gas and water we can look at whole systems,” adds Sharer. “You can do it down to the room level 
and aggregate combined units, such as dollars spent.”

The information, which is stored for up to six years, lives locally in the data center, but users can opt-in to have it backed up remotely “Our hybrid model offers the connection to our sever, which is remote. That gives the added redundancy of having a second copy of all the data, as well as the ability to receive automatic firmware and software updates,” explains Sharer.

For now the company is still in build mode. They are marketing through channel partners and getting referrals from them. Breakstone feels that their system can give weight to the “green talk” that a lot of companies claim, but lack the product to back it up. “Plus, it’s an upsell,” he says.

The cost of the base system is around $7,800 (the price the home owner sees), but Breakstone says all the systems 
they sell go for more, because end-users want to add more sensors. Moving 
forward the company is looking to partner with more control system companies and refine the products. “Our plan from a technical standpoint is to package our 
solution, streamline the solution and make less expensive and easier to install,” 
say Sharer.

Photography courtesy of Agilewaves.