Green Running: Improving your Energy Usage

Decentralized Energy Savings with AI

What if I told you that the smart homes that you’ve seen in Hollywood movies are almost here?

Truthfully, you might not believe me since most of us probably don’t know someone who has one but despite this, certain companies are out there trying to make a difference in this area.

Green Running is one of those companies. They hope to integrate the Internet of Things, AI and the Blockchain in order to help the average homeowner use energy in the most efficient way possible.

Through a short overview of their home energy assistant, Verv, it’s hoped that a key advance in the smart home niche will come to light.

The Importance of Verv

Verv is a home AI assistant that connects to your electric appliances to help you save money. According to Green Running, Verv has five key benefits to offer, which also seem to make clear how the system does what it does.

Device Recognition

Verv doesn’t seem to use all of your appliances to reach its goal of making you as energy efficient as possible. The firm makes it clear on its website that it starts with what appliances are on, followed by what appliances use the most energy and then it begins to give you advice related to how you can decrease the usage of these appliances. In doing this, it shows you what your usage of them is costing you. For example, Verv organizes your energy consumption by day, week, month, and all-time and then shows you the cost of it, in these periods. Again, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t seem to include all appliances in its primary calculations, but only the ones that are costing you the most money.

It’s not just about costs, though. Verv also makes it clear how much electricity each of your listed appliances is using during these time periods, by Kilowatt hour.

Finally, all of the relevant info is presented in an easy to follow User Experience on a dedicated page, which you can see if you follow the link to the company’s website below.

Advanced Insights

The device doesn’t stop with reporting the cost of your electricity consumption, however. It appears that owning Verv also gives you the option to receive weekly and monthly email reports on how much money your appliances are costing you, what overall condition they are in, and how efficient Verv deems them to be.

Verv’s primary website isn’t exactly clear on how it decides what condition the appliances are in as well as how efficient they are, but judging how Verv looks at your electricity usage, it can be said that both of these categorizations relate to spending and overall electricity consumption.

Fault Prediction

The category titled, “Fault Prediction,” seems to actually shed more light on how Verv determines what condition your appliances are currently in. Apparently, this whole process depends on the data that your appliances give out related to their energy usage, over time. Concretely, Verv states that it looks into each appliance’s energy signatures and over time, with machine learning algorithms, it learns how to diagnose any problems there and even advise you on how to fix them.

To be clear, an energy signature apparently relates to how the appliance turns off and on as well as where the channeling of energy, in and out of the appliance, occurs.

Home Protection

No more worrying about leaving the stove on, if it’s electric.

On top of advising you on how to fix faulty appliances that overuse energy or are even close to failing completely, Verv lets you know when you’ve left something on, including the time that it was first turned on. This is, of course, a particularly interesting implication related to this AI system if it consistently works. Despite this, it appears that at this time, Verv doesn’t offer the integrated capability to turn appliances on and off, for you.

Therefore, it’s still advisable that you worry about leaving the stove on, at least for now.

Financial Calculations & Environmental Impact

This last category is directly related to the previously mentioned capability of Verv to report your energy usage, including its cost, in real time. It’s even suggested that over time, as the Verv system learns more about you and what appliances you use for what amounts of time, it will build the capability to directly inform you on your Greenhouse gas emissions. If this proves to be a workable feature, at a large scale, one can only imagine how we can reverse our pollution of the planet.

Future Directions

Green Running is working towards the final goal of making every home in the world self-sufficient as well as able to sell off excess energy that isn’t used to those who might need it.

While this may seem like a tall order, it’s at least a step in the right direction compared to similar projects such as those run by Tesla which, up to now, are not really cost-effective for the average home owner.

Here’s to hoping that one day, all of us will have the ability contribute positively to the atmosphere through our energy usage and that Green Running will be one of the reasons that we’re able to do that.