We had a chat with Chris Hunt, an energy coach for HEA. He explains how he is an energy coach for Californian residents for free.

In part 3 of this series, Chris goes through a typical experience of a homeowner or renter with an energy coach. He uses software that analyses data from a home’s smart meter first. Everyone has one of these in California already. Then, he usually talks to the resident for 20 minutes. After that, Chris walks around the home with or without the resident–depending on what they like. After a thorough inspection, he provides choices and explanations on what best to do to lower electricity and gas bills consistently.

Chris mentions that what he finds often surprise people, especially in how wasteful some devices in the home actually are for little or no gain.

This is part 3 of the series. You can read part 2.

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TRAVIS:  Oh I see. So, if I were a California resident, and I want to try energy coach, I would need you would come over and do all this. How much time do I have to spend before you know what’s going on?

CHRIS:  What I do is … I’ve done the analysis before I even show up at the house. I’ve got the report, which basically gives me a summary of all the equipment. People are supposed to check off whether or not they have a pool, or a hot tub or a fountain or how many refrigerators they might have, et cetera. Do they have an insta hot tap, that type of thing.

CHRIS:  When I get to the house, I spend maybe 20 minutes with the homeowner saying, “First of all, show me where stuff is and let me know and tell me what you think is the problem.” And often you’ll find out that people would say something like, “Well, I think it’s my computers and my cell phone chargers.” But they don’t mention they’ve actually got a fountain in the backyard, that’s been running 24/7 all this time. And depending on the size of the pump, that can actually be a big energy drain. I’ve gone to houses where they had timers on the pool pumps, but the trigger had fallen off. The pool pump was running 24/7 because nobody ever checked the timer to make sure the little trigger was both on and off. So that’s the type of thing I do.  I interview the homeowner for about 20 minutes, I get a tour of the house and the equipment, and then I’m on my own.

CHRIS:  Basically, I’ll set up that little digital monitor that talks to the smart meter and I will walk around the house and I will turn things on and off and I will record the change. Did the monitor show that we just jumped 600 watts or 6,000 watts, which could happen as well. And I record all of that and I spend maybe two hours in the house. The homeowner is usually there. Sometimes they just go off and work in their home office for that period of time, and I will then gather up all my stuff at the end of it, take it back to my home office and write up the report. And even though I’ve got a lot of data, what I’m looking for is the top of three to five items that will make a difference.

CHRIS:  I can say, “Look, it’s not the wine cooler, it’s not the refrigerator that’s actually in the garage,” because they use that refrigerator, so it’s okay with them to have the extra one out there. “But it turns out it is this over here. You have an electric dryer and it’s running like three hours a day because you’ve got four kids.” or whatever and that’s what part of the issue is. Now, switching that out to a gas dryer might be a little cheaper, but it’s actually, one fuel source for another is not what we’re trying to do here. You want to basically make people aware of what something is actually using. So, if they’re on a time of use rate, which is something very popular in California in which a lot of us are going to be on very soon, you say, you want to run that electric dryer at 11 o’clock at night or whenever the off-peak hours are. That’s basically what the analysis does. It’s also what to look for in the future when they get a new energy bill.

TRAVIS:  You pretty much come in for 20 minutes to talk to the homeowner, then you spend few hours sleuthing around with your stuff. And then you come back with a bunch of choices and reasons why the bill is the way it is. And then, essentially, the homeowner just chooses to do it or not?

CHRIS:  Yeah, that’s it … You find that there are some things residents just are not going to do. For example, people will often be told, they should replace the refrigerator. And, frankly, that’s a nonstarter. I mean a refrigerator can be 1500 bucks, and it could take you two years before you make your money back on that. What I try to tell people is that you’re not going to replace your refrigerator until it’s useless. You’re not going to turn off your wine cooler either. But it turns out that you are doing these things over here. For example, you might find a stereo system that is always on, but nobody’s listening to it and it’s simply a matter of saying, “Look, if you use this, let’s put it on a power strip so that you actually consciously turn it on and turn it off when you’re done.” You can also buy power strips that have timers built into them so that you only use something for a few hours and then it turns us all off as well.

CHRIS:  But yes, basically I do the analysis of the house. I go back to my home office, I write up the email that has three to five items in it, and then I encourage the homeowner to actually do those actions.  Then, I’ll make recommendations. Like I said, we don’t sell anything, but I will say, “You need these types of bulbs, and you can get these types of bulbs at these three online websites or you can go to a big box store like Home Depot or OSH or Lowe’s or you can order stuff from Amazon.” And all that, all the lighting out there right now is actually very reputable. It’s good quality stuff at good prices as well. LED’s have come a long way from where they were just a few years ago. They were expensive and people didn’t like how bright they are. Now they actually have, like I said earlier, this Kelvin scale where you can choose between 2700K which is warm yellow, up to 5000K which just kind of a blue, white color and you can choose just how bright you want it essentially.

CHRIS:  And the prices are way down from what they were. But on top of that, the bulbs will last a long, long time. So it’s worth doing. And I encourage people not to wait until the old incandescent or halogen bulb burns out, to go ahead and replace them all at the same time and just put those old bulbs in a box in the garage if you feel like you might use them at someday.

TRAVIS:  We have a pretty good idea what an energy coach does, and what the experience would be like. You and I were talking before how people are surprised by actual power hogs in their homes. And that you just mentioned, you were saying, you were talking about pool pump and you said something about 6,000 watts.

CHRIS:  Yeah, it’s interesting, what’ll happen is, people who have pools often have a pool service as well. And when you come to the house as an energy coach, you check out the settings for the pool pumps and there’s usually a recirculation or circulation pump and there’s usually a sweep as well. Sometimes people heat the pool too, which is just amazing ’cause they will do that. But I look to see how long those pumps are running. So the pool service frequently will increase the number of hours above and beyond what is necessary to keep the pool clean and the water clean. Because frankly that makes their job easier to have the the pool clean when they get there for the servicing once a week. So I’ll say, “You know what, you don’t need to have this pool circulation pump 20 for eight hours a day in the winter when nobody is using it. Let’s cut it back to three hours a day.”

CHRIS:  And let’s start it at 11 o’clock at night as well because when everybody goes to time of use pricing, you want it to be in the rates that are the cheapest and electricity’s cheaper on the off peak hours. So we’ll set the pump to run probably for three hours for the circulation pump and we’ll turn the sweep down to one hour from say three hours before. And sometimes, a sweep isn’t even necessary because they have a pool cover on it. So that’s just a big waste to have a sweep working inside your pool when it’s already got a cover on it and the leaves are being kept out. I will make those changes. I will say, “This is what I’m going to do,” and your pool service may turn ’em back, but you want to tell ’em when they come up, that, “No, for this experiment and possibly a lot longer, we’re going to keep it at three hours and one hour and see what difference it makes to your bill.”

CHRIS:  Because the analysis we’ve done ahead of time will show you that every single day, something was coming on at the same time and running at 2,000 or 2,500 or 3,000 watts an hour for exactly six hours. And we’re saying, “You know what, we’re going to cut that back to three hours minimum then maybe more during the winter time.” There are also things that people can do, like if they decide they will want to replace those pumps, there are variable speed pool pumps out there and one by a company called Pentair, a really good product. And what it does, is it starts up the circulating pump with a higher revolution per minute initially for say, 10 minutes or so. And then will cut that rev back, the revolutions per minute to say, half that speed. So you might run the pump a little bit longer, but you’re running it and using a lot less electricity to actually push that water around.

CHRIS:  So I will encourage people to either go for a new pump if they’re at that juncture where they want to do that with their pool, or at least to change the hours for it. I’ve come to houses and found out they have a variable speed pump, but the pool service has said that it’s running at high speed all the time anyway, so it doesn’t do them much good. So we encourage them to actually get to know how their pool pumping pool service is using that pump and to use it to most efficiently as well. And the neat thing about it is, because of the HEA website, two days after changes are made, you can actually see the difference. So an energy coach like me will say, “Tell you what, let’s turn your pool pump down to half the time and half the speed that it’s currently using. And two days from now when I get the data from PG&E, reported out on our website, I’ll be able to tell you exactly how much energy it’s using now at 11 o’clock at night or two o’clock in the morning as opposed to what I was using this time last week.

CHRIS:  So that’s the proof of the pudding to show people that, yes, this change is actually to make this type of effect. There’s other things like that too. I mentioned earlier on about an insta-hot tap. A lot of people have these taps in their kitchen next to the sink and it basically, you turn it and immediately hot water comes out. And it’s a nice convenience, but you might only use it once, twice, maybe three times a day. The catch is that pump is running or that that feature is running all the time. Out of every single hour, that insta hot tap has to basically gin itself up so that it is it hot enough and that takes 700 watts when it is running. So 50 minutes of every hour, turns out to be about four hours a day it’s running at 700 watts. And you’re not using it that often. It’s much more economical to actually take a cup of water from the sink, put in your microwave and blast it for 60 seconds rather than have this device always ready in the background.

CHRIS:  So again, that’s a good example of something that people are unaware of. That’s very easy to fix. And you can put those on a timer if you want. If you say, “I like the fact that the hot water is available to me, but I only use it a three or six o’clock in the morning and at six o’clock at night.” Well you can actually put the plug it for the insta hot tap into a smart strip and set it up so that the timer only goes on for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. And that is much better than wasting energy the other 22 hours of the day.

Continue reading Part 4: Reduce Bills by Eliminating Unnecessary Waste.