Home Energy Management Software for Power Users With Smart Meters
Designed for energy professionals but available for home use too... Energy Lens is a powerful tool for homeowners who are serious about reducing their energy consumption.
Energy Lens is an Excel add-in for analyzing detailed energy-consumption data. If your home has a good smart meter, or you're willing to buy one, you can use Energy Lens to turn your meter's detailed records of energy consumption into useful charts and tables that will help you to figure out:
- How much energy you're using...
- When exactly you're using it (what times of the day and what days of the week)...
- How best to reduce your consumption...
- How much progress you're making at doing so.
Energy Lens works with detailed interval energy data – records of energy consumption collected by a smart meter, typically at intervals of 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minutes. Until recently such interval data was only available to non-residential buildings. But, with the recent growth in smart metering, it's now becoming more and more widely available to homes.
Most smart meters offer some basic energy-data-analysis features through an LCD display, website, or simple desktop software. But Energy Lens offers more sophisticated analysis than the mass-market tools. And, because it works with Excel/CSV files of energy data, it won't leave you tied to any particular metering equipment or utility company.
It's a powerful tool for smart, technically-minded homeowners who are serious about minimizing their energy consumption both now and over the long term.
If You're Looking for Dumbed-Down Software, Built for Joe Average, Energy Lens is Not for You...
Energy Lens won't try to survey your home or offer you generic energy-saving advice... It won't ask you if you've got low-energy light bulbs so it can decide whether or not to tell you to get low-energy light bulbs... For beginners that need step-by-step guidance, a professional home energy audit should be a much better starting point than any software package.
Energy Lens is a data-analysis tool. It makes it easy to turn spreadsheets of energy data into useful charts and tables.
So, to take full advantage of Energy Lens, you'll need a good head for charts and tables...
You'll also need to know the difference between a kW and a kWh...
Most importantly, to turn analysis into energy savings, you'll need to be able to interpret the charts and tables that Energy Lens generates. We've got videos and articles that can help with this, but there's really no substitute for a homeowner's unique knowledge of their home and the energy-consuming things (and people) that live in it.
Using Energy Lens to help reduce consumption is far from being rocket science, but it's a little too technical for many folks. Many folks just want a simple overview of their home energy consumption. Such folks are better off sticking with the simplified energy-management tools built for the mass market, such as the online tools provided by energy suppliers / utilities, and the LCD displays that come with smart meters.
Go Beyond Instantaneous Power Readings... Dig Into Your Energy Usage Like the Professional Energy Managers
A box on the wall that tells you how much power you're using right now is great, and well worth having in your home. But it can only take your energy-saving efforts so far... For a start, it won't tell you anything about what's happening when you're out of the house, or when you're asleep...
You'll Need Smart Metering...
You can buy clip-on smart meters for home use. And some utilities are fitting smart meters and making the data available online.
Energy Lens will work with most interval data that opens in Excel, but you might need to do a little manual editing if it comes in an unusual format. Feel free to send us your data if you are struggling to get it to load.
Professional energy managers know that the key to minimizing energy usage lies in analysis of detailed consumption records:
- Looking for patterns in the building's energy usage...
- Tying those patterns to the equipment in the building (and the times at which it's running)...
- Turning that understanding into action – behavioral or equipment changes that reduce consumption.
This might all sound a little abstract, but it really is the essence of effective energy management. Provided you're not afraid of a little detective work, digging into your patterns of energy usage will almost certainly give you energy-saving ideas that you would struggle to come up with otherwise. And, just as importantly, it will help you to prioritize your ideas (biggest, easiest savings first) and to keep track of the progress that you're making over time.
We're not just talking about basic energy profiles and simple charts of kWh totals... It takes more than this to really understand a building's energy consumption...
Energy Lens offers powerful analysis features that you won't find in software built for the residential mass market. It is, first and foremost, a tool for professional energy managers. Applying the same tools and methods to your home might err on the side of overkill, but it's a powerful way to maximize your energy savings.
Energy Lens Home – The Analysis Features Used by the Pros, but for Personal Use On Residential Meters Only
Most homes are wasting a lot of energy, typically without even realizing it. The potential to make savings is huge. It makes good financial sense to invest in tools that can help save money month after month after month.
But, in absolute monetary terms, a home can never save as much as a large commercial building. So, to offer a good return on investment, home energy management software needs to cost less than the software used by professional energy managers...
To make Energy Lens a practical option for homeowners looking to reduce costs (as well as their environmental impact), we needed to make it cheaper. But we didn't want to water down the analysis features. So Energy Lens Home is the same package that the professionals use, but with two important restrictions:
- It's for your personal use only. You can use it to analyze the energy consumption of your home. And, if you like, you can use it to analyze the energy consumption of your friends' and family's homes. But you can't use it for commercial purposes.
- There's a kW limit on the data that you can use it with. It should work fine with data from home energy meters, but you won't be able to use it with data from larger buildings.
Photo by Andrew from Flickr
To give Energy Lens a go, just download the free trial. It's the same free trial that professionals use to try out the software before they buy it. The only difference is that, if you want to continue using the software after the trial, you'll probably want the home licence with the restrictions explained above.
We Want You to Reduce Your Home Energy Usage... And We've Priced Energy Lens Home to Encourage That
We initially planned to sell Energy Lens Home through this website. But, after testing the market for a while, we realized that, as an advanced tool that only appealed to the most sophisticated home energy savers, selling Energy Lens Home at a realistic price for home usage was unlikely to be particularly profitable for us.
So we decided that, in line with our mission to help reduce energy consumption worldwide, we should make Energy Lens Home freely available to all the home energy savers who wanted to make use of it.
To get a free licence for home use, just download and install the software and sign up for the newsletter (you'll see this when you open the software), selecting the option to indicate that you want it for home use. Make the most of your free trial (including the extension that the software will offer you for filling in a short feedback form), and we'll email you your free home-usage licence key (with the restrictions explained above) before your trial expires.