The secret to energy saving? Psychology

By Franceska Brown

When the first washing machines made their way into homes in the early 1900s, many people died from plugging them in. The technology was still so new and mysterious that people didn’t know how potentially dangerous — fatal, even, if done with wet hands — it was to wire the appliance to the lighting socket.

Over the century, as people have become familiar with home appliances, their energy footprints have grown enormously. Those footprints can now tell a story of their own.

From the light bulbs you buy to the number of times you boil the kettle before making a cup of tea, your energy footprint has a pattern that reflects where you sit on the energy-awareness scale.

“Every home has a Myers-Briggs type — a sort of personality — based around energy consumption,” says Simon Daniel, CEO of Moixa Technology, a UK energy start-up aiming to cut energy usage in the home. “(People) haven’t thought about the behavioural aspect of energy usage. If you understand it, you can change it.”

For Moixa, psychology was a key consideration when designing the company’s latest home energy solution, OhSo Solar — a flat-pack system that combines a smart central energy server with easy-install solar panels and batteries to provide power via existing household wiring to your everyday electronics and lighting.

Solar power is collected during daylight hours, stored in the battery and transferred to the energy server for powering direct current (DC) devices as needed. Any electricity used is off-grid and represents a cost saving for both the user and the planet.

“(Solar) energy needs to be simple,” says Daniel. “(It has to) work, be mass-market available and fit any home. (It) should be social, not just for David Cameron.”

The use of DC power is one of the key features of Moixa’s approach to energy efficiency. DC powers many everyday gadgets, such as phones, laptops and cameras, whereas alternate current (AC) is supplied as standard for most housing electricity.

DC works well when the source of the energy is close to the thing it powers (think solar-powered phone chargers). While AC is safer to transfer over long distances, it loses energy when transformed from high to low voltage to power DC devices.

The increase in DC gadgets and electronics over the last 10 years is not insignificant. According to the Energy Savings Trust, these products will drive about 45 per cent of home energy use by 2020.

They are also the electronics you care about.

“We’re a wired generation,” says Daniel. “We depend on the internet for our intelligence. It’s part of our memory and if you switch it off, it’s a problem.”

For example, in a brownout — a temporary cut of supply in electricity caused by a surge in demand — your washing machine can probably wait, but if your mobile phone or laptop needs charging, you’re not going to be as understanding.

The OhSo Solar kit was designed with this human inclination in mind. Its DC power and capacity for off-grid energy storage mean that even in a brownout, you can keep using the electronics that matter to you.

It also saves you money. The routers, cordless phones and printers people leave on during the day can be powered with DC — resulting in a daily energy savings of around 200 watts, or eight hours of power for a laptop.

Most important, the smart central energy server is indeed smart. It houses an algorithm that monitors your energy profile and offers you relevant and actionable advice based on your signature via real-time web and smartphone applications.

Incandescent bulbs will show consumption increases when you get home and turn on your lights; washing clothes at 90 degrees will also yield a telltale spike.

With each tidbit of information, Moixa can quote costs and savings for a complete LED retrofit, a new fridge, or a 30-degree washing powder. Daniel believes this will eventually allow direct-to-consumer selling, where Siemens could sell a fridge and Proctor & Gamble a washing powder based on the house’s demands. Essentially, the house could tell you the products it needs to work efficiently.

As someone keen to see this realised, Daniel is critical of energy products designed without human psychology in mind.

“It takes a long time to get people to change,” he says. “If you give them a product that’s ineffective, it stalls (progress).”

Among his culprits are real-time displays (RTDs) — devices the team at Moixa has dubbed “return to drawer” for their short user life span.

“They’re set for widespread launch across Europe and the UK, but (these household monitors) haven’t been persistent in achieving energy savings,” says Daniel. “The initial inclination to turn off everything is unsustainable — you still need to do your washing, even if it does spike your electricity usage. Gradually, you turn things back on and what was a 15-per cent savings becomes 9 per cent and finally 3 per cent. At most, that 3 per cent equates to 1/3 a pint of beer — not enough to keep people interested.”

Unfortunately for Moixa and many others operating within the energy industry, it’s not just about understanding behaviour. Recommendations must be timed to match available technologies, adoption rates and market prices to be feasible. No matter which way you cut it, the cost of an LED retrofit today would be considered prohibitive to most. Even if the total cost of ownership over time is lower than what you have to fork out in the short term for your existing setup, it won’t be affordable for many until material prices drop. Moixa needs to be able to maintain users’ interest should the supply market react more slowly than anticipated.

The company also needs to match its ideas to money. Although no stranger to grant funding from big backers like the Technology Strategy Board, Daniel is now angling for a bigger fish: North American energy giant GE. Moixa is currently competing against other industry hopefuls for GE’s attention through the Ecomagination challenge — a call to action to build the next-generation power grid that will meet the needs of the 21st century. GE is offering $200 million to help realise worthy projects, of which Moixa hopes to be one.

“GE would be an ideal partner for us,” says Daniel, referring to the company’s leading position in the lighting, home appliance and personal finance markets.

From a prospective investor’s perspective, Moixa’s track record for success is good. Daniel and co-founder Chris Wright have been rethinking product categories since the company’s inception in 2006 and delivering: the company’s first product to market, a rechargeable AA USB battery, went from concept to store shelf in six months and was awarded a prestigious Gold iF for its design. It also earned Moixa a spot on the CleanTech 100 list. If the company can scale this success to its new venture, it will no doubt draw attention from the bigger players in the arena.

Now nearing the end of an angel investment round, Moixa is once again preparing for market launch with 50 UK residences set to trial the OhSo Solar kit in March of next year. An initial focus on the home office segment is aimed at leading to widespread home adoption followed by retail distribution and, Moixa hopes, mass-market acceptance. For Daniel, this will mean a 30 per cent energy savings in 30 per cent of British homes by 2020.

Daniel’s Utopian future marketplace might not be too far off.