We had a chat with Chris Hunt, an energy coach for HEA. He explains what an energy coach does and why it is free to PG&E and SCE customers. The utility companies, in effect, pay for this free service. Chris says that energy coaching can save people significant money by reducing their electricity and gas bills month after month. Residents are often surprised the real causes for high electric bills and how little they have to give up to save significantly.

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TRAVIS:  Hey, so today we have Chris Hunt. Chris is from hea.com and he’s an energy coach. Chris is gonna tell us what an energy coach does and what it’s all about and how he can help you.

CHRIS:  Morning, Travis. How are you doing?

TRAVIS:  I love to start out interviews just asking this simple question. When you were growing up, what was the first thing you remember wanting to be?

CHRIS:  It’s funny, I look at pictures of my childhood and clearly I was running around in cowboy outfits, so I don’t know if that was something, a phase that lasted too long, but I actually thought I was going to be a writer. I thought that through high school and college, and ironically I lost that urge once I started running a printing press. People tell a story about Sam Clemens or Mark Twain, as he’s also known, how he was a riverboat captain. And once he was a riverboat captain, the river lost its beauty because he knew all the dangers underneath. And that’s what happened to me when I ran printing presses was that I lost the urge to actually write the great American novel. So I did a number of other things instead and eventually became an energy coach.

TRAVIS:  Wow, that’s an interesting path. Ben Franklin and then an energy coach.

CHRIS:  Yeah, yeah. There’s a long meandering path in between there. I’ve done cooking, I’ve run factory machines, I’ve had product management jobs, managing director jobs at banks, et cetera. So it’s a pretty varied career. But what I liked about this particular job, I started about 10 years ago with my own firm. It was that nobody else was doing it at the time. People were complaining about their utility bills, but they had no idea how to actually fix them. They’d get a bill and their electricity bill or electricity portion would be 75% of the bill, but when they’d look for an energy coach, if they even existed back then, somebody would come in and try to fix the envelope of the house and say, “Well, let’s replace your HVAC…let’s replace your windows, whatever.” And the biggest part of their bill, the electricity side, wasn’t even being addressed.

CHRIS:  So I started back then with monitors that I would actually connect to people’s service panels, to these little CTs or current transformers that you would put around the mains. And that’s how we’d actually do an energy audit back 10 years ago. And the system has just gotten smarter and smarter over time until HEA came along and really capitalized on people’s smart meter data. It was a brilliant approach to say, “Look, we have all this data collected by the utility company. Let’s make sense of it.” And by doing the disaggregation of all the data and putting it into different groups of always on data or variable–or I’m sorry, always on usage or variable usage or winter heating or summer cooling, you can get a lot of information so you no longer have to do it the old fashioned ways as I was doing it, just like when a printing press, you don’t have to do it that way anymore either.

TRAVIS:  Wait, can you roll back a little bit and tell us what is an energy coach?

CHRIS:  An energy coach by definition is somebody who will be contacted after a client or homeowner has filled in a survey on basically hea.com. But people have registered with this website and it asks them various questions and after they’ve answered all the questions, there as an analysis about how energy is being used. They are assigned an energy coach, if their energy is above a certain usage amount. And the energy coach will then get in touch with you and there’s probably about nine of us in the program in the San Francisco Bay area right now. And they will get in touch with that client and say, “I can help you. Here are the things that stand out about the data that we’ve analyzed.” And some of the coaches like me actually prefer to go to the client’s house and say, “Look, I can tell some things just from the data that I’ve analyzed. But there are other things that I can’t explain without looking more closely.”

CHRIS:  I actually like going to people’s houses and doing a thorough analysis. I will actually bring with me a monitoring tool that talks directly to their smart meter. So instead of standing outside and looking at the smart meter and saying, “You’re using 2000 watts right now.” You can have a little handheld display, and you can walk around the house and turn things on and off. For example, some clients will say, “Oh, I’ve got a gas dryer.” And then you turn it on, you find out is 5,000 watts. That’s not a gas dryer, that’s an electric dryer. So knowing that what the changes, as you turn things on and off and recording it, can be a really powerful tool. And the other way you can use that particular data that’s on the HEA website, is you can get that same day to over a period of time.

CHRIS:  As an energy coach, you visit a house, you make some changes, two days later you could look at that data on the website and say, “Ah, that worked. We turned off the hot tub that wasn’t supposed to be running.” Or, “We reduced the pool pump hours that weren’t supposed to be running for 12 hours a day,” et cetera. So an energy coach will come to the house if your bill is high enough, do an analysis and make some suggestions and possibly make some changes as well. And it is a free service that the company offers because it’s something that PG&E has contracted the company for.

TRAVIS:  So it’s actually free to a homeowner or resident?

CHRIS:  Yes.

CHRIS:  Yes and that’s … I’ll be frank, that’s probably the hardest part of getting across to people. They assume that there is something else going on, that we’re trying to sell them something. And we actually sell them nothing. We will make recommendations for products, but we don’t sell any products, but it is completely free to the end user or the homeowner. There are a couple of caveats; they’re fairly simple and one is that, if the end user has solar panels on their roof, that would preclude them from signing up because the impetus for the program, is trying to save energy as opposed to using renewable energy to compensate for however much you’re using. And the second part is that you have to be a customer for 12 months. So we have that amount of data to actually analyze over the period of the year. You can have solar thermal, which is the heating that people use for their pools. But solar PV on the roof is something that would not allow you in the program. Other than that, it’s completely free. And once people sign up, they will be assigned an energy coach, or at least be getting emails and phone calls from an energy coach to help them reduce their energy, both gas and electricity.

TRAVIS:  So why would the utility company pay for something like this?

CHRIS:  Well the utility is encouraged by the public utility commission, the PUC, to reduce energy, particularly in high end homes where there’s a lot of energy that is possibly being wasted. So the utility is encouraged to actually have programs like this. And this particular program that Steve and Lisa Schmidt from HEA started has been one of the most successful programs ever because they have access to this data. So in other programs that I’ve worked on, I’ve seen the success rate, be 2% reduction across the board, and that was a good number in the old days. But HEA has managed to save on average 15% across the board for all the customers who have gone through the program. So it’s a combination of both gas and electric there. But 15% savings is huge. So this has been a very successful program and I guess part of the benefit to the client is because it is free.

CHRIS:  There is no “gotcha” involved in this. They don’t have to spend $15,000 in some type of renovation to their heating system or duct work or windows or whatever. They simply get analysis and meaningful results from the audit.

TRAVIS:  Okay. So when you say 15% you mean, let’s say my energy bill, I get from PG&E or SCE and it’s 200 bucks a month. So you’re saying I’m saving 30 bucks a month?

CHRIS:  Well what we’re saying is actually, I mean the dollar amount is probably close to that, but we are saving, we will reduce energy by 15%. And that could be more than 15% off your bill. So it’s basically if you have 700 kilowatt hours a month on average, we can take 15% of that off on the electrical side. And the same thing with gas. We can take some percentage of the gas figure off as well. And it depends on what your rates are. But it could be even more than the $30 you were talking about.

TRAVIS:  That’s pretty good. So where’s all these savings coming from?

CHRIS:  It’s really interesting. People don’t realize what is actually happening in their own homes because there was no way for them to know before. And I’ve taught classes at PG&E and I talk about this, how when you get a credit card bill, you know exactly where the money was spent and if you get a cell phone bill, particularly if you have kids, you know where every single phone call went. I mean the pages and pages of data, of the bill can be overwhelming. You get an energy bill and it doesn’t tell you anything. It’s simply says you owe this amount, you use this amount of energy. So the benefit of having an energy coach is somebody who can come in and say, “Turns out that you thought you had done the right things in your house, but there’s so much more we can do.”

Continue to Part 2 of the series where Chris talks more about what he finds to save big on people’s energy bills.