Creating the ideal energy metering gateway device

Energy saving on the rental apartment sector not only represents a considerable cost reduction to apartment landlords, but follows the trend of several environmentally responsible solutions, helping to achieve a greener and more sustainable world.

Following this trend, CheckBnB and EnergyCcM wanted to create a new solution to measure and display holiday rental apartment’s real-time power consumption, aiming at educating both guests and owners to control and reduce the energy waste during holidays. In order to do so, diverse warnings and alarms showing deviations from historical averages have been used.

From a hardware perspective, the challenge was to create a small sized and flexible device able to acquire power consumption data and send it to the cloud using NB-IoT technology. Besides, from a software perspective, the objective was to develop a multi-platform mobile application not only acting as energy budget display, but also supporting check-in procedures and value-added services for both visitors and owners.

Product development and FED4SAE support

Even though the concepts were there they were still in an early stage, with the need to find commercial and financial support to be able to take those ideas to the next level.

Therefore, Monsol and EnergyCcM, through its CheckBnB subsidiary, answered the Horizon 2020 FED4SAE open application for midcap by submitting a proposal not only looking for that support, but also seeking international impact to bring their software and hardware developments to a global market.

APP CheckBnB project was one of the companies selected to receive up to Euro 60,000 in funding from the Horizon 2020 FED4SAE project, and they were able to benefit from all the support and skills coming from the project partners in terms of technical, commercial, financial and marketing expertise to bring their ideas to reality.

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, one of their partners, and is currently being commercialized in a different context as a monitoring system for energy systems.

On the other hand, CheckBnB has developed an integrated mobile application to deliver their green “energy budget” vision to the holiday rental market, including 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.

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.

Fighting COVID19 massive impact on tourism industry

During 2020’s 2nd quarter, when the product was going to start its piloting stage in the city of Santander using IoT data obtained through their smart city platform, COVID19 pandemic 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, becoming partners of big companies such as Riello, Steca and Iberdrola.