A PG&E SmartMeter on a Bay Area home. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

Smart meters have arrived for many Californians. More than 11 million have been installed by electric utilities in the state, with PG&E leading the way. The new meters digitally track a household's energy use. So, for the first time, we can see our daily and even hourly data online (with a one-day lag before it's posted).

Studies have shown that consumers reduce their energy use when they have access to this information. But as PG&E and other utilities have discovered, raw energy data doesn't mean much to most of us (including me in this week's QUEST story).

A number of clean tech start-ups and major corporations are jumping into this space, trying to bridge the gap between hardware (meter) and well, "soft"-ware (consumers).

Getting busy people to change their behavior is no simple task. So I spoke to two companies that have worked with PG&E and other utilities on this problem. Both Opower and Silver Springs Networks have designed the web portals that consumers see when they log into their utility accounts. They're designed not just to make us understand, but to inspire us to use less energy in our daily lives. I asked Dan Yates of Opower and Eric Dresselhuys of Silver Spring Networks what lessons they've learned.

Lesson 1: Keep Up with the Joneses

You might think that saving the planet would be enough of a reason to guilt us into energy conservation. But it turns out that our competitive streak is a bigger motivator.

The companies' websites show customers how their energy use compares to similar houses in their neighborhood. Don't worry – they're not publishing exactly how much electricity the Smiths use down the street. But the companies say knowing how you compare to others is a powerful motivation.

"It's not shame," says Yates of Opower. "It is really just recognizing an addressable opportunity to reduce usage. If I have a $250 utility bill, I don't really know how much I can save. But as soon as I know that a similar home in my neighborhood is paying $150, suddenly I feel like I have an addressable gap of $100 that I want to pay attention."

It's called "normative comparison" in the behavioral science world. And Dresselhuys agrees. "People don't like to lose. People start to wonder why they use so much more than their neighbor does and they start to dig into it."

Opower is rolling out new social features later this year that allow customers to compare themselves to friends on Facebook. "It puts the information in a context that's relevant to people. We've seen the power of the neighbor comparison and we're taking it to the next level with the friend comparison," says Yates.

Lesson 2: Provide Concrete Advice

Once you get people's attention, they need specific recommendations to take action on – and those recommendations need to be doable, say Yates. "People don't want data, they want insights."

"I always joke that my mom is my litmus test. And I know that she would never spend a minute looking at raw energy data. But what she would love to find out is that her freezer is very energy intensive and it would be worth it to buy a new one," he says.

Opower is working with PG&E to roll out a new web portal to customers by the end of the year. Using smart meter data, they can analyze a household's energy use and break it into four categories: heating, cooling, base load (like refrigerator and DVR) and everything else (like lighting and TV watching).

Heating and cooling makes up half of a home's energy use on average. Yates says reducing your heating and cooling load is one of the easiest ways to save energy and reduce your bill.

Lesson 3: Get Information Out There

"The average customer isn't getting up in the morning and checking their energy use data," says Yates. Emails, text messages and plain old snail mail are crucial for getting customers to pay attention.

Eric Dresselhuys says mobile devices, including iPhone apps, are making it much easier. "You can get a text if your electricity usage is getting high. Or the utility can send a message on peak days when they need customers to conserve energy," he says.

Letting customers know what their bill will be is also a good way to get their attention. "Today, getting your utility bill is like shopping for groceries all month long and never seeing a bill until the end of the month," he says.

Lesson 4: Set a Goal

Remember those gold stars in elementary school? It turns out we still like to be rewarded when we achieve something.

"What we see is that getting people to go after a goal, even 5%, has a big impact," says Yates. When they track a customer's progress towards a goal, Yates says it helps them save energy, no matter the size of the goal. "It's applicable even if you're at the very bottom of the pile and use a ton of energy," he says.

Lesson 5: Tell People When They Do Well but Don't Overdo it

Say you're super energy efficient, turning off lights and power strips in your house with unrelenting dedication. If your utility tells you that you're head and shoulders above everyone else, chances are you'll stop trying so hard. "This was a concerning outcome of earlier studies we did," says Yates.

"It's been seen in other scenarios. There was an anti-drinking campaign called ‘two beers is enough' at college campuses. There were non-drinkers who started thinking ‘if the campus is telling me two is enough, maybe I should drink more beer," he says.

"We've designed our reports so everyone has a goal in front of them," says Yates. It's always good to reward people for doing a good job, but Yates says they stay away from telling people if they're achieving way above expectations.

Lesson 6: The Smart Grid is Probably Smarter without Consumers

Home automation, as its known, is almost a holy grail for utilities. If technology can take care of energy conservation, then customers don't have do remember to do it.

The idea is that on peak days, when the utility needs to conserve energy, it can send a message to a customer's smart meter. The meter is connected to the thermostat over a Home Area Network, so the thermostat adjusts itself by a few degrees to conserve electricity. Customers can opt-out anytime.

Both the carrot and stick in this case comes in the form of a varied pricing plan. During hot afternoons or so-called "peak events," electricity would be more expensive. So the customer has the potential to save money by shifting their energy use later in the evening when power is cheaper.

Dresselhuys says they saw the potential of this in a pilot with Oklahoma Gas & Electric customers. "The more automation in the home, the higher the level of savings. Using that home automation about doubles the amount of money they can save," he says.

How much air is your house leaking? Are you unknowingly slurping in dirty air from your garage and attic? Perhaps a blower door test can help you find out.

"I went to the ServiceMagic Web site that I learned about editing a Home Energy article," says Tom. "Within less than a minute after I entered some basic information about my house and what I was looking for in the way of an energy audit, the phone rang." It was Sustainable Spaces, a home performance contractor located in San Francisco. Tom made an appointment for his audit for the next week. "They were offering a 'Stimulus Special' for $395."

The house Tom shares with his partner Dmitri was built in 1907. "The home has never been remodeled," says Tom. "We recently had the furnace replaced with a hot water radiant system. We have been careful to keep to the original features of the home, so we got our radiators from buildings built around the same time that used to be part of the heating systems in buildings at Fort Baker." They also installed a renewable energy source. "We installed photovoltaic (PV) panels on our roof, but we should have had the audit first to show us how to use less energy and save on the PV.  Our annual true-up statement says we owe $75 for electricity, but I want to get that down to $0!"

Rob Mitchell, an experienced contractor who knows a lot about Bay Area houses, came with two younger men for an audit of Tom and Dmitri's 102-year-old home. The crew closed all the exterior doors and windows, installed a "blower door" in the main doorframe, and depressurized the house. Immediately, dust and insulation particles began to pour through the "pocket doors" from the attic. After taking some measurements to get a general sense of how leaky the house is, and blocking some of the major air leaks, the crew from Sustainable Spaces then pressurized the house. "We walked around the house with a liquid pencil, which showed there is airflow around switch plates, gaps in the baseboard where the home is connected to the outside, and the cabinet in our kitchen where there used to be 'torpedo tubes,' which used to hold hot water heated by the wood stove, and other places" says Tom.

So the old house has some problems with air leakage, which means heating energy being lost to the outside. The crew also found out that the humidity in the kitchen was 20% higher than that on the outside of the house. "We both took showers that morning, and I had a cup of hot tea," says Tom. That was enough to keep the humidity high a few hours later.

Since the home has no mechanical ventilation, moisture build up could lead to mold growth on surfaces in the living spaces, or-even worse because it is hidden-within the walls. Mold can degrade building materials and create poor indoor air quality. Tom has allergies and a moldy house could make it difficult for him to breathe. Since Tom is living in the mild climate of the Bay Area, where we can open windows and get fresh air other ways in our leaky houses, the moisture may not hang around long enough to be a problem. If he lived in a cold climate such as Minnesota's, or a hot-humid climate such as Atlanta's, fixing the air leaks in his house without adding mechanical ventilation could create a "sick house", meaning one with poor indoor air quality due to mold.

"We won't get the report until next week," says Tom. The report will include specific numbers for air leakage from the house to the outside-or in this case between the living spaces and the attic and basement. Too much air flow means lost energy and too little means a sick house. The report will also give a range of measures that will make Tom and Dmitri's house healthier and more energy efficient. "We'll decide what measures we want done when we get the report. We made our heating system more efficient with the radiant system that heats the living spaces and provides us with hot water. We use half the gas now to heat water than we did before. So spending a lot more on fixing the building envelope doesn't make so much sense to us right now. We'll probably fix the big leaks by air sealing around the attic. And we may insulate under the floor between the living spaces and the basement."

"I wanted to have our house audited mostly because I'm curious," says Tom. "And we want to save energy." But from now on when Tom talks about home performance, and the importance of healthy and efficient homes, it will take on a whole new dimension-the homeowner's perspective.

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The CCHT twin house facility in Ottawa, Canada

The Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others recommend that we set our thermostats at 68°F in the winter and 78°F in the summer. Some people are comfortable at home with these temperatures and some or not. So how can we save energy and still be comfortable?

Besides recommending that people replace their incandescent bulbs with CFLs, we at Home Energy also encourage people to turn their thermostats down when they are away from home during the winter, and to set them up when they are away from home in the summer. Both actions are supposed to save energy. But do they? It's not really that clear. For example, if you set your thermostat at 60°F before you leave for work in the morning, and then set it at 68°F in the afternoon when you get back, does your furnace use more energy raising the temperature of your house from 60°F to 68°F, than it saves by having the temperature at 60°F all day?

Once again the Canadians have come up with an answer. Marianne Armstrong and her colleagues at CCHT used the twin house research facility to show that thermostat set backs in the winter and thermostat set forwards in the summer really do save energy.

In the research house where they set the thermostat back to 64°F at night and during work hours, from 72°F, it saved more than 10% on heating costs compared to the house that was set at 77°F all day and night. A 61°F setback saved more than 13%.

In the summer, a set forward to 77°F at night and during work hours from 72°F saved 11% on cooling costs. Now for the big winner: Setting the thermostat up to 75°F all day and all night saved 23% of cooling costs compared to the house set at 72°F. That's a savings of about 8% for every degree adjustment.

If you lower your thermostat a few degrees when you are away from home this winter, or when you are asleep, you'll save energy and money. If you set your thermostat up a few degrees when you are away from home or asleep this Indian Summer, you'll save energy and money. And you won't be uncomfortable.

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Here are three of the DWHR devices tested, showing the
headers: Left to right, the Retherm S3-60, GFX G3-60,
and PowerPipe S3-60. Credit: Charles Zaloum

The simple workings of a drain water heat recovery device.
Credit: gfxstar.ca, Inventroment Energy Solutions.Canadian researchers from Natural Resources Canada tested the effectiveness of several DWHR devices at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology. For an Ottawa household in which four people each take 12 minutes showers every day, a DWHR will save $150 a year in energy costs (at present, Canadian dollars are about equivalent to U.S. dollars). That's about three times as much energy saved as the energy used to run an energy-efficient 20-cubic-foot refrigerator for a year. Over the 30-year lifetime of the DHWR, which costs about $800 including installation, the device will save the household close to $3,000.The Canadian researchers created a Web-based Drain Water Heat Recovery-Energy Savings Calculator where building contractors, plumbers, and homeowners can go to estimate the cost effectiveness of several DWHR devices on the market. You just need to know the model of the device, the temperature of your shower water, estimated shower times, and so on. Right now it is set to work for Canadian locations. For U.S. homeowners, you have to pick a city in Canada. The calculator will be updated as newer technology is developed and tested.

Here are some Web sites where you can find out more about DWHR devices that were submitted for testing at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology:

• Power Pipe www.renewability.com
• ECO-GFX www.gfxstar.ca
• Retherm www.retherm.com

If a million households in the United States installed DWHR devices, we’d save a collective $150 million in annual energy costs, or about the equivalent of 1.25-billion kWh of electricity–or a ginormous amount of carbon dioxide in air from the natural gas not burned and electricity not generated.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.