Top Solutions from the Innovation to Inspire Tour

With Iro from Rachio, you can save money and water by connecting a smart controller to your home’s sprinkler system and controlling it with your smart phone. Iro keeps up with your lawn’s watering needs so you don’t have to worry about wasted resources or sprinkler scheduling. Included with the Iro controller are features such as Weather Intelligence for weather-related maintenance optimization, customized Auto Scheduling for your unique location, and Smart-Cycle for best practice watering for specific region. The Iro shows you how much water you save from month-to-month with personalized reports so that you can track your own usage and customize settings to better suit your budget and eco-friendly goals.

hue™ merges the energy efficiency of LED light bulbs with cutting-edge connectivity to deliver a new experience in home ambiance. Thanks to hue technology, you can turn lights on and off, change the color of individual bulbs, set light timers and alarms, use your lights as a method of home security, and activate the lights in your home hands-free. With the smart phone app, you can monitor and control your lights remotely and set brightness, color, and white levels from any location.

Nest’s smoke and CO detector, Nest Protect™, uses a human voice to tell you if smoke or carbon monoxide are in your home. By speaking to you instead of blinking a light or beeping, Nest Protect gives you the knowledge you need verbally and provides specifics like, “Emergency. There’s carbon monoxide in the bedroom.” It continuously monitors its sensors, battery levels, and software so that you know exactly when you’ll need to change the batteries in your Nest Protect without the frustration of a low-battery chirp. Monitor your Nest Protect through the Nest smart phone app for full control over the things you can’t see or smell in your home.

The Nest Learning Thermostat automatically adjusts temperature settings based on learning customers’ energy use patterns and eliminates programming hassles by creating a personalized temperature schedule. With heating and cooling accounting for approximately 50 percent of the average household energy bill, Nest can make a noticeable difference by helping reduce energy consumption by up to 20%. The Nest Thermostat takes the local weather into account when making adjustments, which is a major benefit when considering the temperature swings across the United States. Nest users can also monitor and adjust their home’s comfort system remotely by mobile phone, tablet or computer.

SmartThings provides a Hub to instantly connect to different sensors, locks, light switches, outlets, thermostats, and other compatible devices in the home. These devices can then communicate with each other and to homeowners through their smart phones, using the SmartThings app to allow the phone to function like a remote control. SmartThings is compatible with hundreds of smart devices from a variety of manufacturers, and customers can add many other popular smart devices to create a fully connected home.

Sequentric Energy Systems has received a patent for its breakthrough technology, the Smart Grid water heater. The first of its kind, the water heater is designed to have grid-interactive and variable-capacity water heating capabilities, allowing grid operators to manage the electricity needed for heating water by the second. Because of this real-time technology, utility companies can now control and guarantee a constant supply of hot water for all customers.

LG presents Smart Appliances with Smart ThinQ™ technology for individuals who want to know exactly what’s going on in their homes at all times. These intelligent appliances deliver convenience, connectivity, and performance by connecting you with your home from wherever you are. Monitor the status of your laundry, control when you run the dishwasher, receive mobile alerts when your refrigerator drinking water filter needs to be changed, and more. The Smart ThinQ™ app, helps you control energy usage and turn appliances on and off from your smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

Direct Energy Business entered into an exclusive partnership with Panoramic Power to offer a quickly deployable and cost effective, device-level energy monitoring and analytics solution to its customers to improve operational efficiency, reduce energy consumption, and provide the necessary visibility into operations and energy consumption needed for demand response commitment. The self-powered, non-invasive miniature wireless current sensors monitor energy consumption at the individual circuit breaker level, and links energy data to the cloud in real-time. Cloud-based data analytics and storage provide real-time alerts via email or text message to highlight anomalies in energy consumption.

Direct Energy Business signed a partnership agreement with BuildingIQ to offer a cloud-based software solution to Direct Energy Business customers to reduce heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) energy costs, and to improve the carbon footprint in commercial buildings. The software uses advanced algorithms to learn a building’s patterns and to develop a model to improve the building’s HVAC energy performance.