Smart Home

Smarter technologies for the smarter home

With ever increasing focus on energy costs, and the need to achieve changes in energy consumption, we need to develop technologies that actively help reduce our carbon footprint, while improving quality of life. With a decade’s worth of experience, Sentec has deep expertise in this field.

This is a sector where diverse engineering challenges are constantly emerging, driven by new requirements from consumers and the grid, along with developments in related and interoperable products. The market is still immature and new applications and products are appearing regularly.

Against this background, product companies need to maintain a clear vision of their core proposition and innovate rapidly, focusing their developments on specific applications. Sentec has been able to help many companies in this sector, either with a complete project to develop new products for emerging markets or with specific skills missing from our client’s project teams.

Home help for energy

Although the market is moving rapidly, different sectors share key engineering challenges:

Smart meter integration and power management

Integrating displays and controls with the meter allows home owners to visualise energy consumption, and make decisions about energy use. At present this is limited to simple decisions relating to cost of energy and overall use. The growth in domestic products for energy generation, storage, and demand response, will make these decisions more complex. As the network intelligence increases, more options will be available to the home owner.

The effective use of these components will be improved by power management systems which can monitor household parameters (e.g. occupancy, appliance demand) and grid parameters (dynamic tariffs, grid load) and reconcile them based on the desired energy strategy.

Smart appliances

Smart appliances can help reduce overall energy consumption or time-shift demand peaks by responding to network signals. The first models of these appliances are now in the market but their mass deployment raises some issues:

Co-operative response to demand reduction signals
Integration with other domestic products like micro-generation or storage
Opportunities for aggregating forward use predictions

Micro-generation

Domestic scale generation such as wind or solar is becoming available, but these products will need to co-ordinate with other devices in the home and with the wider grid, enabling:

Decision on exporting versus local consumption, based on household and grid requirements
Co-ordination with other local resources, to facilitate network safety and stability
Ease of installation and integration

Energy storage

Storage is crucial for effective use of renewable energy sources, providing a solution to mismatched patterns of supply and demand. At domestic level, it presents similar challenges to micro-generation, with additional constraints of achieving acceptable charge/discharge efficiencies, cost and reliability.

Track record

Working with Sentec provides

A partner with a keen understanding of your market’s requirements and challenges
Access to world class product development expertise
A flexible and easy to target resource
Cross fertilisation of technologies and know-how from outside the industry

For demonstrations of our work in this sector, please visit our case study section and read more about our work with smart meters, home power management, smart appliances, microgeneration and energy storage.

Case Study

Clamp on sensor for smart electricity monitoring

Designing a product that genuinely impresses consumers produces special satisfaction, more so in the area of energy monitoring where products are typically not designed for consumers. Our client, Onzo,…

Markets