Saving Energy and reducing Energy waste for Eco Smart Short rental Holidays Home

Challenge

The users of a holiday rental property enjoy an “all included” business model. Under this system, human behaviour is often unconservative, generating a waste of resources that would otherwise be precious, relative to the cost of energy or water, and thus increasing the carbon footprint and the owner spending. This sector consists of 97 million beds in the world, accounting for 25% of the global hotel supply, and continues to grow increasing the problem and leading to accelerating the climate change.

Solution

Through a measurement system based in energy consumption sensors, a predictive algorithm and smartphone app, a recommended energy consumption budget is generated for the duration of the whole stay, according to the number and age of the tenants, as well as the weather forecast. This budget is made available to the tenants and homeowners in a challenge or gaming mode, so that they can meet expectations on a daily basis, generating alarms and educational tips as well as gratifications and compliments, depending on their behaviour with respect to the estimated budget.

The energy consumption is monitored in real time and can be analysed by all users through the app. The immediate result of this supervision is a greater interest in not squandering. Once the challenge is over, the users will receive a financial bonus if they have fulfilled it, which they will be able to recover or donate to an NGO, as well as keep a good-behaviour score.

The app shall also solve other issues and situations related to holiday rental, providing the tenants with a greater comfort and a better and more professional service by the owner.

FED4SAE Support

With the support of FED4SAE we have been able to partially finance the development of the app, the measurement hardware and the kick-off of a pilot project with 10 houses in the city of Santander. At the same time, the partners of the project have provided technical and economic support, and they have opened the possibility for investors to implement this app as a standard for Eco Smart Holiday Homes.

Achievements

By using STMicroelectronics technology and support, EnergyCcM has been able to create a functional device, known as CcMaster, fulfilling all the requirements. This prototype has been certified by Telefonica, which is one of their partners, and is currently being commercialized in a different context as monitoring system for energy systems.

On the other hand, CheckBnB have developed an integrated mobile application to deliver their green “energy budget” vision to the holiday rental market, includes additional functionality to help P2P accommodation and deliver real-time location-based context information to guests, taking advantage of the Smart City and IoT domain know-how from University of Cantabria.

As a result, CheckBnB was awarded 2nd place as Spanish national best energy efficiency start-up company. Last but not least, the commercial and marketing skills acquired through the close collaboration with Blumorpho have helped them to bring their solution to the market and increase the odds to attract new investors.
During 2020, COVID19 impact on tourism sector prevented CheckBnB to fully complete the project and APP CheckBnB mobile application development needed to be postponed. Still, the CcMaster hardware created in the context of FED4SAE supported application experiment has been reused by EnergyCcM on a completely different domain. In this sense, they have pivoted its original use on rental apartments towards solar energy and public lightning sectors.

Impact

Our challenge to achieve the greatest possible impact is to disseminate the system through prestigious NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF, and thus raise awareness among users in order to not waste precious resources. In the same manner, the objective is to convince homeowners to invest in a system that will bring short-term economic benefits and help combat climate change.

The main objective is to make this system a standard filter, similar to price or rating, according to user comments in the big management channels (AirBnB, Home Away, etc). If we were to achieve this goal, the impact would be of incredible dimensions and it would help very effectively to combat climate change.

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