Climate Right to Sell Home Energy Management
See how your firm can integrate energy management into your portfolio to help generate RMR.
Why Security Dealers Have an Edge
Energy management in the connected home is completely integrated with the interactive home security system, giving the property owner the widest set of features and capabilities to reduce energy waste and save money. Motion detectors, door and window sensors, as well as the alarm setting itself, provide real-time information about activity throughout the house. Knowing activity and occupancy in the home allows the energy management service to reduce power use as much as possible when the home is empty, and make sure it is always comfortable when occupied.
Solar Beginning to Shine More
A small but growing number of consumers seek energy management services to reduce their carbon footprint and make a personalized contribution to protecting the environment. Solar, in particular, is a big growth opportunity and according to a recent report, 2012 was a record-breaking year for solar energy in the United States with 16 million panels being installed. This is another high-growth market segment that home security dealers can enter into and win new business through a connected home service.
Integrating solar into energy management allows the homeowner to monitor and compare their solar production with their home’s overall demand. They can also reduce their home’s overall consumption so that their solar production can make a greater contribution to their energy use. With the right investments and energy management service these homeowners can modify their home’s consumption so they can sell excess solar production to their local utility.
The system even learns activity patterns and schedules over time so automations become tightly integrated to the property owner’s activity to make cost savings as convenient as possible. Homeowners can view the activity patterns of their house and create automation schedules for their thermostat so the home is comfortable when it’s most likely occupied and efficient when it’s most likely empty.
Security sensors not only provide valuable information about what’s happening inside a home, they can also trigger automations to make saving energy as simple as possible. The ability to control a device through a mobile app or a programmable schedule is a highly desired feature that allows the property owner to take action to save energy; however, triggers help make automations simpler. The property owner simply goes about their daily routine and their home will automatically adjust how it uses energy.
For example, setting the security system to “armed away” can also trigger the thermostat to adjust to a personalized efficiency mode while also turning lights off. Using a single trigger to automate multiple devices is an important differentiator of energy management in the connected home.
Energy Management Made Effortless
New kinds of triggers make thermostat automations completely effortless. Location-based triggers (or Geo-Services) use the GPS-based location of a homeowner’s smartphone to automatically adjust the thermostat between a personalized energy saving and comfort mode. When a homeowner leaves the area around their home the system adjusts for maximum savings, and when they return it automatically adjust back to the more comfortable setting.
Location-based automations are both highly efficient and easy for the homeowner to use. In selling energy management, ease of use is an important feature to highlight. Some new technologies can include a steep learning curve that deters consumer adoption, but location-based automation delivers the greatest benefit while being almost transparent to the user.
Using new sources of data as triggers for automations and personalization doesn’t end with GPS. Other information like local weather, for example, creates new opportunities for the homeowner to save even more money on their energy bill. On unusually hot or cold days the thermostat can automatically adjust to save additional energy in comfort mode. While this can save money under any circumstance, making these small adjustments during extreme weather pays off even more.
With so many unique features and benefits of energy management in the connected home, dealers have plenty of different ways to deliver value to a wide variety of consumers. Again, because it’s all deeply integrated with the interactive security system dealers are advantageously positioned to bring energy management services to new customers and to upsell existing accounts too.
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