At Kiwigrid, Lars Schwarzelt oversees the development of Kiwigrid's home energy management system (HEMS), "The Independent Home", as Vice President of Products & Customer Success; at home, he then uses the HEMS in a private context.
He lives in a single-family home with his wife and two children and uses the HEMS to monitor energy flows in the household. Lars can, therefore, put himself precisely in the perspective of an end user. This enables him to identify potential for improvement from the end user's perspective and report possible system errors directly to Kiwigrid.
The first step to saving energy: gain transparency about your own consumption
Lars has installed a PV system with ten kWP on the roof of his home. His setup includes an inverter and the SOLARWATT EnergyManager Flex, on which the latest system from Kiwigrid, KiwiOS X, is installed. The monitoring system creates transparency about how much electricity the PV system generates, when, what is consumed in the house, and where. Established in August 2021, the HEMS allows Lars to see when power generation is exceptionally high and when turning on or charging electronic devices is worthwhile. This knowledge has already had an impact on his everyday habits. Since installing the HEMs, large electricity consumers such as dishwashers or washing machines tend to run during the day rather than in the evening to make the best possible use of solar power.
The perspective: Extend setup and automate energy optimization
So far, Lars is using his HEMS primarily to analyze and monitor his plant's consumption and generation data. In the future, however, he would like to expand his setup. He already has two EV chargers in the garage, which he would like to connect via EEBus. This connection is currently available for heat pumps and will soon be available for EV chargers. With his expanded setup, Lars also wants to actively use other functions of the HEMS, such as energy optimization. The intelligent control and energy-optimized tuning of the devices will give him and his family an additional boost in savings.
A win-win for both sides: How Lars and Kiwigrid's HEMS benefit from each other
For Lars, the HEMS offers the possibility to increase his self-consumption and degree of self-sufficiency. For him, as an end customer, the most essential requirement of a HEMS is the stability and reliability of the data displayed. That's why he also attaches particular importance to this on the development side. The fact that Lars uses his own white label SaaS solution privately allows him to report errors directly to Kiwigrid. As the product's developer, he has a particularly sharp eye, allowing him to react quickly to suspicious behavior. As soon as the system behaves differently than expected, Lars addresses this anomaly directly to the office the next day. This is an excellent benefit for Kiwigrid - having a developer in-house who is also the end customer.
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