Navetas and Cambridge Design Partnership develop novel home energy hub

In the future, Intelligent Energy Metering will be all that is required to manage all domestic utilities. A sophisticated metering solution developed by Navetas, with its product development collaborator Cambridge Design Partnership, accurately measures electricity consumption of each home appliance providing consumers with unprecedented level of control over home energy usage. It is capable of monitoring gas and water usage and also home-generated electricity for sale back to the grid. The home energy hub offers distribution companies a single point to monitor multiple utilities and develop more creative billing options.

Energy billing is set to become more complex. As homeowners begin to sell back to the grid energy they generate from solar panels and wind turbines, so new approaches are needed to tackle this complexity and provide intelligent switches.

Nick Wellington of Navetas explains that the intelligent meter, together with its separate display unit, has been developed to be easy to install by utility companies and intuitive to use by consumers.

“Home energy monitor products have recently become popular, but these have limited functionality as they only provide an estimate of usage. The problem for the householder is that the final bill can vary widely from this estimate.

“Our solution provides an accurate measure of the actual energy usage and can be broken down by appliance. It is possible then to compare the efficiency of appliances and see at a glance where energy is being used.

“The smart hub can be easily retro-fitted by the utility company as it attaches at the point where the service enters the house. The information is then sent wirelessly and made available to the householder through a touch-screen display located in the house.”

The ability to drill down to the consumption of individual appliances comes from a new technology that identifies the ‘signatures’ of individual electrical appliances by interpreting both mains voltage and current electricity waveforms.  

The benefit to the customer is that usage is displayed in real time and it can quickly be identified where savings can be made. It also paves the way for novel billing models, which could reward greener energy use and assist in ‘load levelling’ of the national grid.

The technology was developed by Navetas Energy Management in partnership with Oxford University. Navetas has a seasoned management team with many years of experience gained from senior positions in the energy industry. This industry knowledge and innovative technology has been combined within a market-facing product by Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP).

CDP developed the Smart Hub’s styling and mechanical design and developed the electronics and software to provide this complex functionality, including supporting Navetas in implementing its patented algorithm in real hardware.

In addition, CDP’s product designers created a remote user interface concept which presents data from the Smart Hub on a wireless touch-sensitive screen allowing users to examine their real-time energy use and energy-saving statistics interactively.

Richard Hunt of Cambridge Design Partnership comments,

“If people are aware of the true cost of their consumption of services they are in a stronger position to introduce strategies that will save them money and cut down on waste. Our work has been directed at making this information easy to collect and display in a format that the householder can understand and act upon.”

Nick Wellington believes that CDP has met the brief.  

“We are getting an excellent response in our trials and feel confident that our technology is being presented in a market friendly product. This is a huge and growing international market and with Cambridge Design Partnership’s support we are well positioned to exploit it.”