Microclimate Control - The pitch

Not everyone is comfortable at the same temperature. Why compromise? With microclimate control every room can be set to maximize comfort while also minimizing cost. Automatically turn off the AC while people aren’t home in the summer.  Heat only the bedrooms at night in the winter. And never have to argue with your family about temperature for the whole house.

Microclimate Control - The fun part

The reason why Nest is a huge success is that it’s really simple to use. Getting MCC to “just work” will be key to its success. I think that some clever machine learning and some good industrial engineering could make that happen.

Microclimate Control - The growth potential

There are about 100 million households in the US. If 1% of those households purchased MCC per year that would be one billion dollars in revenue. In the case of the rev share model, if the average household saved fifty dollars a month on their utilities and there was a 50/50 rev share, that would be $300 a year for MCC or $300 million a year if 1% of the population used MCC.

Microclimate Control - The monetization

There are two potential pricing models. First, this could be sold as a normal consumer good that requires the user to install and setup Microclimate Control (MCC). I think the price of the MCC main controller, 5 vents, and micro controllers would be around a thousand dollars.  The second pricing model is to have a rev share setup. For sharing revenue, or more accurately cost savings,  all that is required is the previous year’s energy bill. Any money that MCC saves would be split between MCC and the customer. If the customer lives in an area that gets hourly summaries of energy usage, it could be possible to calibrate the system to be even more accurate than just looking at previous costs.  I expect that MCC could save the average household $25 - $200 per month (some houses in the north-east have $400 heating bills per month in the winter).

Microclimate Control - The idea

The primary problem that I see with climate control is that it isn’t very targeted. One of the nice things about Nest is that it sets the temperature of the house to change with what people require, e.g., turn off the AC when people aren’t there.  Nest allows time targeting for climate control, but it still is at the granularity of a household (or at least the climate control system).

Microclimate control would have a main wall controller like Nest, but it would also come with a set of two other things. The first would be a set of wirelessly-controlled AC/heat vents. These would replace the normal vents and could be opened and closed by the Microclimate controller. The vents would be wireless and come with a long lasting battery. The last part would be room controllers. These would look like smaller versions of the main controller, but they would have a suite of sensors to detect what’s going on in the room. A combination of a temperature sensor, light sensor, IR sensor, and a sonar sensor could determine if the lights are on, warm things (people) are in the room, and if there is movement in the room. These inputs would help the system to learn when people want the house at different temperatures.

Let me walk through a few scenarios. During the winter at night, you may want the bedrooms warm but the rest of the house can stay cool. The user would turn the main controller down and the ones in the bedrooms up. The sensor data could be used to model what the room looks like when people want it cooler or warmer than the rest of the house (such as when people are in the room). Once the models are well-trained, the heating system could respond to unusual events like someone getting up in the middle of the night.  The heat would be automatically turned up in the other rooms where the sleepless person spends time until they go back to bed.

One small point is that the system would have to learn the relationship between the different wireless vents and the room controllers. If there isn’t an exact one-to-one ratio, then this relationship could be a complex. For example, it may be necessary to run the vent in a room next to the one you want to heat if there isn’t a vent in the room with the controller.

Microclimate Control - The motivation

For many people one of the largest recurring costs they have is from heating and cooling.  Most thermostats are pretty stupid and cause us to waste a large amount of electricity. Nest is a step in the right direction, but just a start of what could be.