Crunching Energy Data Down to the Greedy Fridge

(BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK) The data delivered by a smart meter is good at telling you how much overall energy your home has consumed. What if you want to know if your fridge is an energy hog, or if someone in your household is leaving the lights on all day? A four-year-old startup called PlotWatt has developed smart algorithms that can crunch energy data down to the appliance level to determine which of your household devices is sucking up more than its fair share of power.

Each appliance's electricity consumption can be measure without using extra hardware. (picture credit Pavel Ševela / Wikimedia Commons)

While a lot of companies are tackling this problem, the key to what makes PlotWatt interesting is that the startup can monitor the energy consumption of individual appliances without using monitoring hardware. Other startups are selling sensors or smart plugs that can track the energy consumption of unique devices, but PlotWatt says its smart algorithms can determine this type of detail without any hardware at a greater-than-90-percent accuracy level.

Read full article by Katie Fehrenbacher in BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK