ecobee Launches ‘Donate Your Data’ to Advance Efficiency Research
First-of-its-kind program provides home heating and cooling data to advance building science
TORONTO — Smart thermostat company, ecobee, has launched “Donate Your Data,” a new program that allows customers to voluntarily contribute their home data to help advance energy efficiency research. Historically, these studies have been undertaken with very small groups of homes. As a leading smart home company, ecobee has created an opportunity to engage more than 1 million customers to share data, anonymously and securely, with leading research organizations to advance innovations in energy efficiency.
Donate Your Data will share anonymized information — including basic home details such as age, size, and occupancy as well as reporting on indoor and outdoor temperatures, HVAC usage, and occupant preferences. Data will be shared with leading academic, governmental, and non-governmental organization (NGO) research partners across North America.
“Our customers want more than just savings on their energy bill; they want to make a difference,” said Stuart Lombard, president and CEO of ecobee. “With Donate Your Data, ecobee customers have the potential to supply an incredible amount of data that directly supports some of the most sophisticated advancements in energy efficiency, which is core to the mission ecobee was founded on.”
The Donate Your Data program leverages the ecobee thermostats installed across North America and gives ecobee customers the chance to opt-in to support leading scientists and researchers studying home energy use. The program will produce a large-scale data set on home heating and cooling, upon which researchers can build their energy efficiency studies, accelerating the pace of innovation in technology, program, and policy design.
“This customer dataset is truly unique,” said Alan Meier of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We are looking forward to gathering deeper insights on how people manage their home heating and cooling. This is the type of data that will accelerate our research and help us identify further home energy efficiency opportunities.”
ecobee has already recruited research partners including the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carleton University, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Resources for the Future, and Toronto Atmospheric Fund. The company said it continues to recruit new partners and customers into the program. To learn more, visit www.ecobee.com/donateyourdata.
For more information on ecobee, visit www.ecobee.com.
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Publication date: 11/8/2016
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