Paul Szymkowiak from Smart Energy Groups about energy use awareness

Beyond Zero's Matthew Wright speaks to Paul Szymkowiak from Smart Energy Groups Melbourne, about how we can make our homes and businesses more energy efficient. Use the SEGs meter to connect your switchboard to the internet. 

http://smartenergygroups.com/home

http://smartenergygroups.com/blogs

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/success-stories/2011-04-27/inside-...

Beyond Zero speaks to Paul Szymkowiak

download

Transcript

Matthew Wright Today I am very happy to be able to present to you Paul Szy from Smart Energy Groups, based here in Melbourne where our studio is, so its a bit exciting to have someone in the studio today. And Paul is a bit of an electronics buff, but he’s got the simple answers for everybody listening. So, I’ll throw him on now. G’day Paul, how are you going?

Paul Szymkowiak Good thank you, nice to be here.

Matthew Wright Now, yeah, look, Smart Energy groups, lets just start by a quick overview. I was checking it out on the web at, what was the web address?

Paul Szymkowiak Ah, www.smartenergygroups.com

Matthew Wright And I saw all of your control systems, a great system basically for being able to monitor what’s going on in your house, you know, your refrigerator, your air conditioner and all that sort of stuff. We’ll be talking about that today, but before we do that, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in energy and efficiency and things like that.

Paul Szymkowiak Sure. So you may have guessed by the accent, or not, that I am a Kiwi. I grew up in Wellington, and Mum was always hounding us to turn off lights, and recycle as much as we could. So, I have kind of grown up with that from a very early age and I have tried to stick with that as much as possible along the way.

Matthew Wright And you said the composting..

Paul Szymkowiak Yes, that’s right. So we had a scrap bin in the kitchen, and any bio-waste had to go in there, and be composted out in the garden.

Matthew Wright And good kiwi style, every light had to be turned off as you left the room.

Paul Szymkowiak Oh absolutely, as you left the room. That’s right.

Matthew Wright I had the same experience with my Kiwi folks as well, so obviously a common New Zealand thing there. Now, Smart Energy Groups… Tell us, what was the inspiration to get into the sort of, smart monitoring side of things in buildings?

Paul Szymkowiak Sure. So, the group was started by Sam Sabey, and I guess probably his initial ideas around it started in 2007. And he’d been working in the Utilities sector for about 15 years. He had gotten involved in the smart meter program, and kind of looked at that and though, well, you know, there are probably different things that can be done, potentially some better things that can be done, and started thinking about ways a community based metering program might be able to be established. So that’s how he got started. And from there, got involved with a group her in Melbourne that are called Connected Community Hackerspace, they’re basically an electronics club, and a number of folks there basically gave Sam support and ideas about how to get what eh wanted up and running. So yeah, sort of taken it from there.

Matthew Wright And was he an electronics guy prior to that?

Paul Szymkowiak Yeah, he had a history working with remote control airplanes, and helicopters and things, so he had a background in that, and definitely was able to take that initial thinking, and then get members from the hackerspace to expand and help him with some of the tougher problems.

Matthew Wright Okay, so let’s walk through it. Obviously everyone’s been, everyone’s been not just offered, but have got smart meters thrust upon them..

Paul Szymkowiak Right.

Matthew Wright .. so, how does it all compare? What’s the smart meter that the Victorian government’s approved going to do for you, and I think they’ll be similar around the country, although that’s not totally pending right now. But, what’s that going to do versus your smart meter group’s technology?

Paul Szymkowiak Right so, I guess at the moment the meters as they have been installed, a lot of the features or capabilities that are actually in them now, are kind of been hobbled. So you can’t get data out in real-time, there’s not much in the way of control going on, although your supplier can disconnect your power if they need to. So at the moment, the feature set is very much focussed on the supplier side of the equation. What we’re doing with our meter, is basically giving people on their own side of their switch box, or switch board, the ability to monitor all of the fuses in the house independently, and also, if you want to sort of, go to the next stage, control each of those independently. For example, if you had your air-conditioner on a separate fuse, you could turn that off, and that gives people real-time access to that data. So being able to see exactly what’s happening in real-time, and being able to control that as well. But I guess probably the thing that really makes what we are doing special is the back-end website. So, it’s very easy to get confused when you’re looking at a lot of electricity monitoring data, because there is a lot of it, and it’s hard to know what it means. So we spent a lot of time with designing a website that people will be able to understand, the breakdown of the data, graph and chart it, and monitor it in different ways. And the other thing we are doing is, making the control easy to understand, so you can see a green button that means the thing is on, and you push it, and it goes red, and it’s off. And being able to see that in real-time is very, I guess, leading edge if you like compared to what the smart meters do by themselves.

Matthew Wright And look, some people have said, that the smart meters sort of, I guess are just an excuse to do meter readers out of a job, and that remote monitoring. Is there much more than that? You mentioned supply on and off…

Paul Szymkowiak Yeah, you know, they’re capable of doing that. I mean, our understanding at the moment is that, the communications infrastructure that would make a lot of that stuff, the higher end functions work, it just isn’t in place. And so, it’s hard to know when that’s going to come into play, but the idea that you might do rolling demand management in a browned out situation, so that devices, or feeds that weren’t so important could be turned off or reduced in some way. Those are great possibilities. We’re hoping we can actually do that with out own set up, and we’re thinking about things like, if you get a community of people using our metering system, can they manage their demand, based on their own criteria? They can say look, he know john’s got a chest freezer in his shed, if we are in a situation where the community doesn’t have enough power, why don’t we cycle that periodically or turn that off for a period of time if we have to. So..

Matthew Wright So the opportunity there to instead of load shedding some outer suburb with not much infrastructure, which is usually in the low shedding algorithms in the utilities, you could just get everybody’s freezer, or air-conditioner or something, and save some of those people from being hit by a full outage.

Paul Szymkowiak Yeah, correct.

Matthew Wright So, in terms of the smart metering system, lets try to walk through say a domestic residence. Now I obviously understand that you have commercial and other applications as well, but, let’s say a domestic residence, all the different kind of supplies within the house, that you’d be likely to monitor?

Paul Szymkowiak So, I guess the simple installation is to put a six channel monitoring board in near the switchboard. And you would elect six fuses that you would want to monitor. And what we often do is, often the main feed, plus another five, and that sort of means we can do a virtual channel if you like with the remainder. So we can say the remainder is the difference between the main feed and the individual things being monitored. And typically people do things like; they might group all the lights together. Or they might look at GPO’s at different points in the house. They might look at…

Matthew Wright What’s a GPO?

Paul Szymkowiak A general power outlet. So you might look at different rooms in the house, you might group those together. It depends on what your needs and interests are in the monitoring. And if you’ve got things like, air-conditioner or a fridge on a separate fuse, it’s really good to be able to monitor those separately. And that data gets captured, radioed up to the internet, and you can start to look at where your power use is going. And we often find just doing that alone is enough to make people aware of, gosh it’s a lot more than you realize, or, what’s that thing? Oh, I didn’t even realize it drew so much power. From there, some of our more, I guess, advanced users, start to look at monitoring individual power outlets. Can you control and monitor an entire entertainment centre? So we want to be able to switch that on and off independently. Or, if the air-conditioner wasn’t on its own separate fuse can you monitor that? So the way the system is set up, is it’s quite configurable, and you can grow it over time. You can start with a couple of channels and then build more as you go.

Matthew Wright If you’re using a switch mode power pack to power this unit, how much power does the actual power unit take?

Paul Szymkowiak It’s pretty minimal. I can’t the exact figures, but you know, certainly in terms of volts, its only using about 5 volts and it’s probably about half an amp roughly

Matthew Wright So in terms of getting it wired in… actually, what would a system representative system cost of you had say, six supplies, and put a power point there at the front switch board, and it’s all installed, and all I get as a customer is a log in for the web and that’s all ready to go.

Paul Szymkowiak So depending how you approach it, you’ll get change out of $1,000. It might be more towards $800-900. It depends how difficult the installation might be. And so, you need to basically have us wire up the board for you get an electrician to do the installation, based on the laws here in victoria, and there’s a little bit of configuration tog et you up to the internet as well. So that’s all done for about $1,000 or less, and then you’re up and running.

Matthew Wright That would be great to be able to get a system like that installed, and I guess for consumers though it’s great to have you on the show because it’s really hard to find these kinds of offerings and solutions are out there. Does somebody actually contact your organisation, or are you the developer and third parties do the installation and the solutions?

Paul Szymkowiak We do a little bit of both, so we’ve been working with a number of organisations to do rollout and deployment for us but, at this stage of development, we’ve been going what, probably a couple of years, and a lot of what we do is, people finding the website. We do a lot of meeting with industry groups, we were at the sustainable living festival, and we’ve done a presentation recently at the ATA, the Australian Technology Association here in Melbourne. And so, those presentations, and meeting with user groups and community groups tends to draw in a lot of our business. But often when people are searching on the web they’ll come across us as well. So we get people contacting us about very specific problems that they want to take control of.

Matthew Wright And we’re talking about the supplies. I will walk through my house for instance.

Paul Szymkowiak Sure.

Matthew Wright So I’ve got three reverse cycle air-conditioners, which are 2.5kw delivered units…

Paul Szymkowiak Right.

Matthew Wright … so they take about 600-700 watts each…

Paul Szymkowiak Right.

Matthew Wright I’ve got three of those and I use them for heating, not much for air-conditioning...

Paul Szymkowiak Okay. Yep.

Matthew Wright …but they are all on the 120 amp circuit, but I think monitoring that alone would be pretty useful….

Paul Szymkowiak Yeah I agree.

Matthew Wright …cause that’s just a space heating and cooling thing ..

Paul Szymkowiak Agreed.

Matthew Wright ..I don’t need to monitor the individual units.

Paul Szymkowiak Yes.

Matthew Wright …and I have got a fridge coming in and out, that’s my other biggest consumer..

Paul Szymkowiak Okay.

Matthew Wright … and in the future, I want to replace my gas booster, my solar hot water…

Paul Szymkowiak Right.

Matthew Wright … with a heat pump boost…

Paul Szymkowiak Okay, okay

Matthew Wright so it’s all electric, and that way I can run my whole house on renewable energy

Paul Szymkowiak Right.

Matthew Wright And finally, I’ve got a 1.6Kw solar system on the roof, which I want to upgrade to the full 5Kws, to take advantage of the full feed in tariff if I can get it installed before the government takes an axe to that.

Paul Szymkowiak Right.

Matthew Wright So, how could that help me get an understanding of where my power usage is?

Paul Szymkowiak I think.. We were chatting just before the show, and I was saying that one of the things that Sam and I find is, we used to go into a site and say, well that will be the thing that is drawing the most power and that’ll be the problem and we’ll need to do some work around that. And you find that once you get the monitoring in that it’s not quite the way you thought it was going to be at the start so, we’ve become quite humble now, we put the meter in and let it speak for itself. We look at the data and say, ah look at that thing there, that’s what’s causing the problem. So I’m thinking with the way your set up, you could definitely get some insights into your configuration at home, you might even see things if you were monitoring individual heating or cooling systems that, one is not operating as efficiently as others and needs a service. We have seen that a couple of times when we go into commercial set-ups, where we have a bank of fridges, and you will see that one is spiking, or drawing more power and a simple call to a service guy, reduced the amount of power that it is drawing. So, I guess I am hesitant to say exactly what you would find out if you were monitoring, but it definitely sounds like the type of set up that would be good to look at.

Matthew Wright As soon as I hear you were talking about commercial space, seems like the building automation of sector, or the building control sector is catered for in the mid-range, to the high-end, but you’re finding a niche in the small to medium sized buildings?

Paul Szymkowiak We definitely are. I think, one of the things that appeals to people when they look at what smart energy groups does, is that the visualization of the data is so understandable. People can look at it and it looks nice, they can understand what’s going on. So we get a lot of requests now for, can you put this in and solve a demand management problem, or you know, we’re using too much power we want to find out what’s going on? But can you also expose that to the people in our association. So that might be students in a college. It might be workers in an office building. It might be customers. And so being able to expose that data out to the community and have them aware of what’s going on is people get quite excited about that. But we have been doing a number of quotes and discussions with people around that stuff. So there’s are a couple of buildings in downtown Melbourne saying, we’re not really happy with out incoming supplier, kind of what you guys are doing, can you come and give us a quote for fitting out the whole building. We did a pilot a little while ago, with a 7/11 gas station down in Port Melbourne. So I guess the user base is quite broad, it’s a mix of home and commercial, and community groups, but we’re definitely getting more of the commercial interest, so that is good.

Matthew Wright We’re speaking with Paul Szy from Smart Energy Groups, and they’re a developer of a monitoring system, similar to what we have been hearing smart meters should do, but the implementation often in Australia isn’t quite that, so they’ve got sort of a premium offering, where you can really understand your energy use, and that allows you to react to your energy use, and develop better ways to deliver your own energy services, and potentially reduce your cost of living and environmental impact, so a pretty good service there. And it’s a Melbourne Australia developed solution based on an open sourced platform. We can be a little bit geeky now. Can you tell us a little bit about the system, the electronics from the ground up, how it happened, and how it got built?

Paul Szymkowiak Sure. So as we were saying, in about 2007, Sam had been doing a few back of the napkin sketches about what a community built meter might look like, and he came up with some ideas for that. He got involved with the group at Connected Community Hackerspace here in Melbourne, and pulled in some of their ideas and thinking about how to approaching the meter. The way the boards been built, it’s been driven by what’s called an Arduino micro controller. So , I guess over the last 3 or so years, there’s been a kind of revolution in electronics and home hobbyist in that. But interestingly enough, that’s lead to a bunch of companies like Smart Energy Groups growing out of it. The Arduino micro controller, you can connect it to your computer, program it, and it’s able to control and monitor various things. On top of that we have built our own open source metering board, which has a number of sockets that have sensor plug go into them. And basically monitors electricity travelling thorough a load wire, using an induction clamp. So it captures that, does a little bit of pre processing on it, gets it up to the internet through a wireless router, and then once that hits the website we do a bit of number crunching on that, and then provide it so that people can graph it the way that they want. So on the website there are a number of different, very nice looking controls, bar graphs, line graphs, heat maps, stacking graphs and so on, speedometer controls. So you basically take those data channels of your electricity usage, and you drop them on to whichever controls you want, and make it look the way that you want, expose your data, and shows you some interesting stuff about whats going on.

Matthew Wright Interesting actually, because Google wanted to get into this space….

Paul Szymkowiak Right….

Matthew Wright So have you arranged to sell out to them yet, or, you know….

Paul Szymkowiak Well, it’s one of those things that’s interesting about the ways that we have build it, is that you know, other people are doing this stuff, but the look and feel of the graphs is unique, and also the grouping aspect is also kind of unique, there’s a couple of people in the U.S looking at similar things, so the idea that you can share and expose that information to a group of people. If you look at things like Google power meter, a lot of it is basically a simplified version of what we’re doing. So we have kind of taken it to the next level. I guess there’s no reason why you couldn’t take some of that metering technology, and connect it to our back end as well. So, the fact that we’ve kind of build it on a series of modules if you like enables some interesting options there.

Matthew Wright And from a social aspect, you talked about groups…,

Paul Szymkowiak Right…

Matthew Wright …and people being able to anonymously display their data or actually say who they are,

Paul Szymkowiak Right….

Matthew Wright and create a group, and be able to compare amongst people…

Paul Szymkowiak Yes…

Matthew Wright what do you think is the social aspect of that, and what could it achieve?

Paul Szymkowiak So, it’s fairly early days with that yet, we are still trying to figure out how people are reacting to it. But, for example, we’ve got one of our members who’s out in Geelong, and he’s got a group set up where he basically exposes his weather station data through the group, so he’s chosen not to expose his electricity usage, and chosen what the rainfall is, what the temperature is inside the house, and various points on the property. We’ve got other groups that are, for example Energy Matters, have two solar rays on their, solar panels, on their warehouse roof, and their actually using Smart Energy Groups to show which ones performing better so can see which panel is generating more power based on the sun at that point in time. So you can choose what data you want to show, so for example you might say I only want to expose my solar data, but not my consumption. As you suggested, you could set up an anonymous group so it’s not obvious who’s data it is. You can also create a private group, so you can expose the data only to the people that you want to invite along to look at that group.

Matthew Wright And you just invite people via their email address or something do you?

Paul Szymkowiak Yeah, that’s correct. So you basically send them an invite from the website and they get it in their email, and they can go on and have a look at the site. One of the places that it actually is exposing their data is the Port Phillip Eco Centre, who are attached to St Kilda Botanical Gardens. So you can at any moment in time you can go and see what the Eco Centre is doing, and because they are focused on sustainable practices, it’s quite interesting seeing the different things they’re doing, and how it affects their consumption.

Matthew Wright And do you have an API programming interface that allows people to integrate into their own website, so they can seamlessly show that to customers, or affiliates, or associates, or colleagues or friends?

Paul Szymkowiak Yes, yes. So there are a couple of different options there. So we’re quite focused on people being able to have access to the data, and not sort of trying to hide that away from them. So, you can definitely get to the Smart Energy Group site, and pull your own data out if you want to. You can get basically if you wanted to draw information of the hardware metering platform, and do other things with it. For example we’ve got a couple of users who have put a little tiny visualization device on their site, so they can see what the real power being drawn at the moment is. So there are a number of different options there about how you can access the data.

Matthew Wright And, I think that’s a great, I guess, a great help to have that real-time historical monitoring capability. I just want to ask what actually happens if you are someone who turns their internet router off at night, ‘cause you’re a real conserver of power. Does it have a buffer or a memory space where it can store the tracking, or do you need to have the internet running most of the time? I mean, how long can it go without gaps?

Paul Szymkowiak So, there are different ways that you can configure it to do that. By default we don’t configure it that way. So by default we can configure it to be constantly running that data up. It monitors it every 45 seconds by default. You can make it more frequent or less frequent if you want to. But we have done some interesting things like remote site locations where we use 3G broadband, and then power off local renewable power sources to keep the thing running. But, the short answer is at the moment, that if you’re wanting to get that real-time access and control, you do need to keep it running. Certainly with the Arduino you can do things like build a buffer, and store stuff locally, but we don’t do that by default.

Matthew Wright So it’s a future possibility?

Paul SzymkowiakYeah, definitely. And with a lot of our initial community that got involved in the project, they had done a lot of that sort of stuff themselves, so they’ve taken the open platform and modified it to do various other things, so local storage is one of the things that people have done.

Matthew Wright It’s obviously a good thing for a new company not to broaden it’s scope too much…..

Paul Szymkowiak Yeah exactly…

Matthew Wright as support costs go through the roof.

Paul SzymkowiakYou’ve hit the nail on the head. There are so many things we can do with this platform, and right now we need to stay focused on the core vision that we’ve got, and what a lot of people have been asking is, what else can you monitor? And the answer is whatever you want. But it’s not our core focus. So in the future we might look at things like water, we might look at things like gas. It’s certainly possible with the platform. A little bit more complicated in terms of installation, but all of those possibilities are there.

Matthew Wright I noticed in the paper the other day that the Cape Patterson Eco Village has been approved. And to follow that, I used to work for Client Positive, associated with one of the guys there and, have you spoken to any Eco Villages? I visited one in Currumbin year ago, and it had a monitoring system that wasn’t too bad, but I know that they’re costs were very high, possibly higher than what you were quoting then. Have you spoken to any Eco Villages, or any proposals for ones about what you could do there?

Paul Szymkowiak So, we haven’t specifically, but we were involved in the sustainable living festival this year, and there were a couple of folks showing shared housing opportunities, and I would like to follow up with them because their idea of co-habiting and share house set ups, and being able to know in that communal sue situation, where the powers going, and who’s using it is is a pretty useful thing to do.

Matthew Wright Yeah great. So it’s fantastic to be able to hare that knowledge with us. And I am sure there’s one or two other players in the space but it sounds like Melbourne’s got a solution we’re offering…

Paul Szymkowiak Absolutely!

Matthew Wright And it’s a pretty good one coming from that utility background, so understanding facets of the industry that can help there. So I guess if you recap the website…. people can find out

Paul Szymkowiak Sure, sure.

Matthew Wright … whether it’s something to suit them, or you could compare products.

Paul Szymkowiak Absolutely. So its www.smartenergygroups.com and your more than welcome to go and check out the site, have a look at the articles, and some of the example sites. Look under the groups section, and you’ll get an idea about what it looks like when you get your data up on the internet.

Matthew Wright And you can get some of those published real-time sites?

Paul Szymkowiak Exactly, yes so you can. So if you look at Sam’s home I think its called, you can see exactly what’s being used there right now. Go and have a look.

Matthew Wright Great, great. So we’ve been talking to Paul Szy from Smart Energy Groups, that’s www.smartenergygroups.com and they do smart monitoring, and in the future control, so that you can run your individual supplies at home, and there are commercial offerings there too. So that’s www.smartenergygroups.com, and you’ve been listening to the beyond zero show, produced by the climate solutions think tank Beyond Zero Emissions, I’m Matthew your host, and we hope to see you again next week on your community network station.

transcript by Matthew