Most people are desperate to reduce their water and energy consumption – not only in an effort to help with the current climate crisis, but to reduce their bills.
Smart meters are a very powerful means of encouraging people to change their consumption habits. That’s because they provide a detailed, accurate and real-time display of a household’s water, electricity and/or gas usage.
The increased awareness in consumption that smart meters provide is proven to encourage households to change their habits and behaviors to reduce their usage. But what smart meters don’t do is tell us which home appliances are the most energy hungry or which appliances or activities use the most water. That level of detail can have a really big impact on consumption as it focuses attention and efforts.
Introducing disaggregation i.e What uses most in your home
That’s where disaggregation comes in. It’s where we use data from a household’s meter combined with additional data about the home and its residents. We use this information to tell the customer which appliances/touchpoints consume the most in their home. We don’t even need real-time meter readings – although the smarter the data gets, the more detail we can provide about appliances and behaviors, and their weight in the total consumption.
We offer a standard as well as an advanced disaggregation service as part of our behavioral science based customer engagement programs.
Standard disaggregation
Most suppliers opt for our standard disaggregation services is based on meter reading data (which can be from any meter, it just requires a minimum number of readings) combined with information the customer provides about their home, appliances and consumption habits. We collect this information via our online customer survey, which up to 90% of active users in our engagement programs complete. We also collect data from other sources including open data – then our algorithms get to work compiling and processing all the data so that we can provide each customer with an individual breakdown of the appliances, touchpoints and activities (by way of a pie chart) that are consuming the most. Users find it very helpful as it provides an instant clear picture of what devices or activities use most in the home.
Advanced disaggregation
Our advanced disaggregation service offers the same service, but as you would expect – an advanced version. It requires either the supplier or the customer to invest in an advanced disaggregation device – a device to replace or supplement smart meters that provides a higher frequency of data readings.
This enables our algorithms to identify and cover a greater number of appliances/touchpoints in the home to provide the customer with a more detailed and precise picture.
Let’s look at the differences between the two solutions.
Standard
- Provides customers with a breakdown of their top 8 consuming appliances
- Is up to 85% accurate
- Is powered by our algorithm that considers usage data, customer household data and survey data
- It doesn’t require any additional investment by the household
Advanced
- It detects up to 50 electrical touchpoints with 75-95% accuracy
- It provides a breakdown of consumption by all detectable appliances
- It requires an advanced algorithm that’s powered by smart meter data and additional CAD meter data obtained by an advanced disaggregation device – which requires additional investment.
Users love disaggregation because one pie chart will tell them which appliances or activities are consuming the most. It’s highly visual, very insightful and easy to understand. They can access this information via their secure MyAccount.
INNOVATION TIP – We can even configure it for skills on smart home assistants, so the customer can ask Alexa (for example) “what consumes the most energy in my house?” and be given accurate and useful advice in return.
We always recommend a consumption breakdown picture like this is far more effective if it is accompanied by personalized recommendations and tips on reducing usage. To discover which customers would be more receptive to this level of information and detail, we can analyse the results of our standard customer engagement campaign to understand which customers are actively trying to reduce their consumption. Those customers are likely to be more receptive to investing in an advanced disaggregation device to get more granular detail.
How are you helping your customers understand and reduce their usage? Why not use customer data to give important information back to customers to help them reduce bills?
We’d love to help you help your customers conserve energy, keep homes warm and reduce the impact of rising prices. Get in touch to book a free demo or assessment of your business.
Read more about some of our customer engagement programmes designed to save energy and water.