EcoFactor Beats Programmed Thermostats by 17%

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 9, 2011) - EcoFactor, a leading residential energy management solution offered through service providers, today announced aggregated results from multiple pilot and commercial field deployments showing the dramatic energy efficiency savings delivered by its individually optimized and adaptive technology. The results, collected from deployments by multiple service providers delivering the EcoFactor service around the country, show, on average, a 17% reduction in energy use as compared to an unoptimized but programmed thermostat. Additionally, the company released results showing that the EcoFactor service also significantly increases residential demand response yield, relative to conventional DR techniques, while greatly reducing discomfort.

In addition to saving homeowners hundreds of dollars a year in energy costs, EcoFactor's data-rich application provides the unprecedented ability to document savings on a house-by-house, day-by-day basis. These results prove that an automated energy management solution can significantly lower residential energy usage for consumers and simultaneously improve demand response yield for utilities, while providing unprecedented measurement and verification granularity.

These results were achieved in EcoFactor deployments by leading energy and home service providers in large metropolitan markets spread across the country. Households received average energy savings of 17%, yielding monthly cost savings of up to $56 during the period measured. Additionally, the utilities involved, including Oncor in Dallas, saw a dramatic increase (36% in one instance) in demand response yield per home, without impacting the homeowner's comfort level.

"These documented results are very encouraging, and we still have a number of energy and money-saving techniques that we have yet to roll out. In the coming months we expect to deliver even larger energy savings, and do so without asking homeowners to compromise comfort or give up control," said John Steinberg, CEO, EcoFactor. "EcoFactor is breaking new ground in residential energy management by delivering significant savings without sacrifice. It works because we're going beyond basic remote controls that just make the specific changes that consumers tell them to -- and thus can only save energy to the extent the homeowner understands how to reduce usage and change their behavior accordingly. EcoFactor does it automatically, maintaining desired comfort levels while delivering big reductions in energy use, making it a profitable addition to our service provider partners' portfolios."

How It Works:

EcoFactor enables home service providers to add energy management to their existing service portfolios to reduce energy usage and costs by reducing waste in the heating and cooling of each connected home. EcoFactor's solution can save up to 30% of heating and cooling costs, without requiring customers to compromise comfort, change their behavior or even pay attention to their energy consumption. Because the average American family spends approximately $2,200 a year on energy bills, with almost half of that going to heating and cooling costs, EcoFactor can save homeowners hundreds of dollars per year.

EcoFactor's patented cloud-based service uses the home's broadband service to connect with a communicating thermostat. Using the thermostat as a sensor, EcoFactor identifies each home's unique thermal characteristics, while also taking into account occupant preferences and weather patterns, and uses this information to determine how to most efficiently heat or cool the home at all times. The EcoFactor system automatically makes the necessary changes to the thermostat to maintain the desired comfort level of the inhabitants while delivering significant overall savings. The homeowner always remains in control, and can reprogram or override at any time.

In addition to optimizing energy use for the homeowners in these deployments, the EcoFactor service has also been able to frequently identify issues such as furnace and air conditioner malfunctions that may be wasting extra energy.

About EcoFactor
EcoFactor is a residential energy management platform that enables home service providers to offer an energy management service to their customers that does not require them to compromise comfort or change behavior. The EcoFactor platform uses data from communicating thermostats to determine the unique thermal characteristics of each home and automatically optimize energy use to eliminate waste and save money. Based in Redwood City, Calif., EcoFactor was founded in 2006 to provide an automated alternative to behavior-based residential energy management solutions.