Six apps to run a smart home? Electrification pilots expose energy management headache

A Home Energy Management System (HEMS) is supposed to take the hard work out of running an electric home. But two Australian pilots are finding that installing one can take most of a day, turn electricians into IT support, and leave households juggling six apps.

Whether the most sophisticated systems deliver enough extra savings to justify their cost is still being tested.

The findings, presented at All Energy this week in Melbourne, by teams working on South Australia’s Energy Masters and the Illawarra’s Electrify 2515 pilot projects, pose an awkward question: are we making household electrification unnecessarily complicated?

“[HEMS] are still a little bit too hard to install, a little bit too expensive, a little bit too hard to use,” Electrify 2515 pilot operations manager John Buchelin told the session.

Home energy management systems promise to coordinate batteries, hot water, EV chargers and other appliances, and help shift consumption to times when electricity is cheap or solar plentiful. Done well, they should help lower bills and help the grid accommodate more electric homes.

But getting different brands of equipment to communicate reliably is proving difficult. And a system that monitors electricity consumption doesn’t necessarily manage it.

The two ARENA-funded pilots are approaching the challenge differently. Energy Masters is wiring home appliances directly into a centralised network that automatically adjusts power use based on grid demands and electricity prices. Whereas Electrify 2515 is exploring several HEMS products alongside a broader effort to get households off gas, and help people shift consumption themselves.

Energy Masters has shown that household appliances can be connected and controlled together, according to Ed Langham, the lead researcher for the Energy Masters project at the University of Technology Sydney. He told the conference the equipment installed through the project represents 2.2 megawatts of flexible electricity demand, although the financial benefits for households are still being assessed.

However, installing and integrating appliances through the HEMS has been harder than anticipated.

“Variation in electrical layouts, Wi-Fi signals, combination of different appliance types and brands in particular has made it really quite difficult to standardise installation procedures across a range of homes,” Langham said.

It takes nearly a day to get the HEMS working in many homes. That includes firmware updates, troubleshooting, and commissioning sometimes with five apps open and someone back in the office helping diagnose problems.

Langham said HEMS cost between $500 and $1,000, with similar costs for installation, and whether that investment is justified is unclear.

“Whether full appliance integration outcompetes just picking off batteries and hot water systems through simple scheduling is a question that we can’t quite answer yet,” he said.

There’s also no guarantee the HEMS will continue to work after installation.

“As soon as there’s another electrician or another tradesperson in the house after the HEMS has been installed, it can actually break the communication,” Langham said.

For homeowners, complexity creates a different problem: people lose interest, or lose trust.

Adelaide University researcher Lynette Washington said Energy Masters participants reported having to use more than six apps to manage their appliances, and despite early enthusiasm for checking consumption, interest faded quickly.

“We’re getting a lot of mixed feedback on [HEMS] usefulness,” she said.

“People have a really low understanding of its functionality, relatively low engagement with it, and they’re not sure that it provides them any real benefit, especially when there’s interoperability concerns with other appliances in their household.”

And if apps disagree about energy, the new system can be the loser.

“Particularly when someone’s had a Tesla battery for a little while and they trust that app, and then the HEMS is giving them different information, they trust the Tesla app and they don’t trust the HEMS,” Washington said.

For households on tight budgets, conflicting information is more than an irritation.

“They can’t afford to have a mistake in a bill because the information they were given was incorrect,” she said.

Electrify 2515 researcher Elona Rey-Costa reported similarly mixed responses. An understandable interface for a HEMS is important, but so is whether the device does something beyond just monitoring.

“There might be a little bit of excitement with this new app when you first open it, but if it’s not actually providing any orchestration or anything for you, and it’s just a monitor, that interest does drop down as well,” she said.

Buchelin said that the HEMS used in the Illawarra pilot had become useful monitors to help households understand bills and change their consumption. But even that benefit often requires human support to ensure households get the most from the technology.

Electrify 2515 has run library drop-in sessions to help residents decipher bills, compare quotes, and work out what their apps were telling them.

“We effectively ran a genius bar for your home energy,” he said 

Electrify 2515 applicants were strongly motivated by climate action, but some reported they would have abandoned electrification without the team’s help. 

“Again, the motivation was never a problem,” Rey-Costa said. “It’s very much how do we actually help them through this process.”

Whilst these are interim findings from the pilots, they’re not a verdict that HEMS can’t work. Some installers are already offering products tested in Electrify 2515 to customers outside the program. But controls already built into batteries or solar systems, or simple timers, may be enough for many households. 

A national electrification rollout can’t assume every electrician will become an IT specialist, or every household will have a project team at the local library. Nor can it assume everyone has reliable Wi-Fi.

And whilst Australia needs households to electrify it should not be dependent on them troubleshooting software and managing multiple apps. That complexity should probably be handled by the products and the businesses supplying them.