Energy contractors could find themselves facing competition for home energy audits from an unexpected source: smart thermostats.
While this may seem unlikely at first blush, sophisticated algorithms being developed for new-generation thermostats are getting better at spotting inefficiencies and recognizing the need for home-energy improvements.
Home energy audits are a pretty clean business opportunity for thermostat maker EcoFactor, says investor Nat Goldhaber.
One company making such an intelligent thermostat is EcoFactor. Other vendors with bidirectional thermostats that connect to the Internet and access outside information include the Radio Thermostat Company of America, Tendril and Ecobee.
Nat Goldhaber, managing director at Claremont Creek Ventures and an investor in EcoFactor, says EcoFactor’s thermostat is smart enough to know how much heat or air conditioning a structure needs. It can then tell by monitoring a home’s interior whether the heat or cool air is escaping too rapidly through cracks and poorly insulated seams.
“This is sort of mind blowing,” Goldhaber said in a recent interview. But it is the result of sophisticated software designed to manage and conserve energy, and to access outside information, such as weather reports.
Will that mean EcoFactor becomes a home energy audit competitor? “I think that is a pretty clear business opportunity for EcoFactor,” he said. “You likely will be able to determine if a house needs caulking, insulation” or other improvements.
The key to this ability is two-way communications, whether over the Internet or another network. And it is an ability being widely adopted in advance product development.
Communications allows a thermostat such as EcoFactor’s to read weather forecasts, tap into servers, process home use data and fine tune energy consumption. It also lets them create historical energy profiles and comparing profiles to other profiles to determine an expected baseline and measure deviations.
Goldhaber says the theme of using sophisticated analysis to better understand energy use will drive future investments. With EcoFactor playing in the residential market, that means finding similar commercial opportunities. It also means ratcheting up complexity: homes have one thermostat, but offices and industrial plants frequently have several, as well as elaborate computer management systems running chillers, networked lighting and production machinery.
What’s needed, he said, are sophisticated algorithms to analyze these multiple systems and make sense of the relevant “signals” amid the everyday “noise.”
Posted by Mark Boslet 
