Kiwi company launches power saving panel
Supplied by Basis
A New Zealand start-up is selling smart panels it says could help households save on their power bill by more than $1000 a year.
Once installed homeowners get insight over how they're using electricity, the ability to automate appliances and advanced electrical safety features.
Basis chief executive and co-founder Danny Purcell told
Nine to Noon
it'll allow households to know how expensive it is to run the dishwasher each time, or how much a shower costs.
"At its base level, it measures electricity use 20,000 times a second and what it does with that information is it transfers it into different use cases," Purcell said.
"So you might want to understand what happened with a fault in an appliance ... so say your lights have switched off because you used your toaster and you want to know why, all the way up to how much does my hot water system cost me last month or last week or yesterday."
If you were to blow a fuse you'd get an alert on an app to tell you there was an electrical fault. Purcell said in the future it will be able to tell you exactly what caused the fault too.
"Then in the back end, if you enable it then your electrician will be able to view those fault codes, they'll be able to help diagnose the faults in your property properly."
When Purcell installed one of the smart panels in his own home within two weeks it was able to learn exactly how much he spent on hot water.
"I then set a routine to manage the hot water cylinders on this on and off period and I'll probably save somewhere between $1100 and $1400 a year.
"A core part of the offering on the app side is that we integrate all of these different electricity retail plans for you so we take away all of the mental load of trying to figure out what is the cheaper retail plan to go to based on the unique way that me or my family use electricity."
It is about shifting the time you use things like hot water and heaters, he said.
"Saving money is often confused with energy efficiency and using less electricity but they're not the same. So the way that you save money with electricity is by using it at cheaper periods of time."
Upon launch the company had 7500 panels on order.
The panel fully replaces the traditional fuse box in a house and while it costs more up front to buy, Purcell said it will allow people to save in the long-term.
Its goal is to make energy effortless and affordable for everyone, he said.
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