🔒PowerWise nets pact to monitor Arctic homes

Ray Toothaker's Naples home is a small case study for his company's energy monitoring products. Using his own company's software to track all of the circuits in his house, the PowerWise vice president of business development found various appliances drawing phantom power. The savings from that knowledge — around $15 a month — are modest, but PowerWise has its sights on bigger numbers here and abroad.

Earlier this year, PowerWise was selected as the monitoring tool for an experiment by the Arctic Energy Alliance, which is studying efficient home design in the tough climate of Canada's Northwest Territories. The alliance is using PowerWise to compare the energy efficiency of a conventionally built home with a passive solar home in a severe Arctic climate. The company was also selected as the monitoring system of the Passive House Institute U.S. The eight-person company based in Blue Hill continues to build its portfolio of intellectual property and expand its reach internationally, where Toothaker says there are ready markets and new regulations that are driving demand for smarter energy use.

Mainebiz chatted with Toothaker, who is assuming broader leadership responsibilities within the company in the next few weeks. The following is an edited transcript:

Mainebiz: How does the software work?

Ray Toothaker: We have devices from just measuring temperature — it's a little temperature probe — to temperature and relative humidity, to temperature and relative humidity and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) or CO2 levels. They just put these in various locations around the house or the building and they get wired up on a CAT5 [ethernet] wire and sent to our gateway. That's the heart of it. [The gateway] collects the data from the building and sends it over the local network to an analytical cloud server that puts the information through a number of algorithms and sends it back so people can use it.

MB: How are homeowners and businesses cutting energy costs?

RT: It really runs the gamut depending on the type of building. The least amount of savings we have seen is 4%-5%. We've also seen it up to 40%, so there's the two extremes, but the average is somewhere around 15%-20% in a home. Commercial side, you're talking about a lot because they use so much more electricity typically, so there is a major savings there. Especially restaurants, which, per square foot, are one of the highest electricity consumers around other than maybe a hospital that has huge equipment.

MB: Is the market for your product stronger abroad than in the U.S.?

RT: I think the market is very strong in the U.S., in certain areas. And the more energy we consume and the more energy prices go up, the more people are going to be interested. In Canada, [the market is growing] more on the commercial side rather than the residential. We're now getting into the European market — we're opening up a partnership in Paris — and we did some testing at our first commercial customer there about 45 days ago. They realized that there was one piece of equipment that was using about 40% of the energy for the entire building and it was a piece of equipment that had a problem. It wasn't obvious because it was still working.

What's gone on in France is that there is a government decree that they have to — businesses in particular — by 2014 stay within this footprint and it's some formula that's based on the size of the company, how many square feet and past history. But once they start going past that energy-consumption line, they're going to start paying extremely high tariffs. France itself is a phenomenal market. They've just been looking for a solution like this that gives them the detail. Because other than just turning lights off or turning your PC off, what do you do if you don't know exactly where your power consumption is? You're pretty much in the dark.