ThinkEco: Helping users want to conserve

Most of us nowadays know to do something if we see a faucet in our home dripping uncontrollably around the clock. Even if we don’t consider ourselves particularly “green,” we know waste when we see it and understand that all that water slipping uselessly down the drain is money taken from our pockets.

With electricity, though, we don’t get such visible nudges to conserve. All those electronic vampires we leave plugged in in the kitchen, office, living room and bedroom suck up their electricity quietly and invisibly, leaving us with nothing but guesses about which ones are the biggest energy drains when we get our bills at the end of the month.

That, of course, is the idea behind the smart electricity meters that utilities around the globe want to roll out for their customers. But some people find this invasive and unwanted, even if they also realise they should — and could — find ways to cut their home energy consumption. Utilities who tell energy customers like these that they’re being wasteful and need to conserve could end up making them feel resentful instead. That approach, one recent study found, could make people less willing to change their energy habits for the better.

“(I)n fact the guilt may have the opposite effect; hardening the opposition to co-operation,” warned Consumer Focus, the UK’s energy watchdog, in a study on “Informing choices: Consumer views of energy bills.”

So how can we get a better picture of where in our homes and businesses we’re wasting energy … without having to put that information in the hands of our utility companies? ThinkEco, a young tech firm based in New York City, says it has an answer in the form of a “modlet,” a modern outlet or smart plug that plugs into your existing outlets and adds a new layer of intelligence to the energy that flows out into your various electronic devices.

With a single two-outlet modlet and USB receiver (both are included in ThinkEco’s $50 starter kit), you can quickly start monitoring and managing the energy you use. Plug the modlet into the wall, and the USB receiver into your computer or laptop, and you’ll be able to see, for example, how much electricity your desktop printer uses, even when it’s turned off, or how much energy your entertainment centre drains when it’s in use versus when it’s not in use.

“When people see where waste is coming from, it kind of clicks more,” says Mei Shibata, ThinkEco’s chief business officer. “Our goal is to make everybody want to conserve.”

The “smart” in the modlet’s smart-plug design comes from the accompanying software that “remembers” when you typically switch devices on and off. You can then use the web-based interface to set rules in accordance with your habits, telling the modlet, for instance, when to switch on power to your laptop in the morning, and when to cut it off at the end of the day.

Rolled out to business customers first, the modlet will be made available for home users sometime later this spring. Shibata says early tests in both offices and homes have generated some interesting results. In larger offices, the device has led to friendly competitions between departments and floors as to who’s doing more to save energy. In homes, parents have used the modlet to not only show their children how much energy the TV uses, but to illustrate how much time they actually spend watching television. So it can become a time-management device as well as an energy-management one.

“We’re really about empowering the end-user to make their own decisions,” Shibata says. “It’s really the end-user’s choice.”

While that approach isn’t “smart grid,” in the sense of making our large-scale energy infrastructure more efficient and more responsive, there’s no question it’s smart.