Earth Notes: Smart Radiator Valves Video

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product is Radbot and this thing is technically

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Radbot 2R, so it's Radbot 2 with a radio in it.

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I'm Damon Hart-Davis, right, here we go.

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So tell them what you're gonna tell them.

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What problem is Radbot trying to solve?

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What's our solution?

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A little bit of history, where are we now?

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And there's a bit of alphabet soup there.

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How does it work?

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Don't worry, I won't wait right until then to tell you,

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but I'll try and make sure I'm in a position

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to answer a question.

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And some secrets for devs and the more techy of you in here

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who'd like to tinker.

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Okay, so what is the problem?

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The problem that we're trying to fix is climate change.

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It's actually written into the articles

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and memoranda of Vestemi, that its job is to help

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ameliorate climate change and we're doing it

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through space heating.

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So you're probably all aware of these facts,

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but to reiterate, carbon emissions contribute

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In the UK, over 10%, I mean, I used to think it was 20%

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and I saw government as just quoting a number back at me,

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but I think it's about 10% of all carbon emissions

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are from domestic space heating.

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So not water, you know, in the home, not offices,

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not cooking, domestic space heating.

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And the scary thing is that maybe half of that

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in to cut entire carbon emissions that we could just do

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without and be no colder.

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And one huge source of that waste is heating empty rooms,

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e.g. your bedrooms during the day.

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You sit downstairs in the lounge or whatever,

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and you only need them warm when you go to bed,

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And, you know, another problem we're trying to fix

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is that people do come out with technical solutions,

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but absurdly technical that need wifi and broadband

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and Bluetooth and I don't know.

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One of the systems I tried out, programmable radiator valve,

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I found too bloody complicated to use.

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And I have a master's degree in theoretical computer science

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which convinced me there needed to be a simpler solution.

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So one of the early things in Open TRV's existence

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was winning a prize at a thing run by British Gas,

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which preceded Hive, their connected homes thing.

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And it was noted that all the winners

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weren't actually connected.

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So we're kind of IoT without the eye,

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but we can do the eye and I'll show you some of that later.

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So what's the solution?

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So Red Bot attempts to make it all easy,

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solve all your problems, having to lift a finger

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by soft zoning.

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So a number of you have mentioned

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that you have multiple zones in your house.

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So it's not as it used to be,

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sort of when the arc was being launched,

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that is either all gets hot or it doesn't all get hot

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or even worse, you have to balance it

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'cause some bits overheat and some bits never get warm enough.

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Treat every occupied space as its own zone

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for heating control

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and do it without having actual pipes and valves to do it,

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but do it with soft zoning.

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And that's what Red Bot does.

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Now, some of you've been coalescing multiple radiators

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in a single room to make a zone, each Red Bot acts by itself.

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So each radiator really is the zone,

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but not vast quantity of rooms actually have two radiators.

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And anyway, Red Bot's quite happy

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to control those two radiators separately.

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So what's it all about?

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How do you save energy?

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Well, set back the temperature when the room is vacant

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and likely to be for a while,

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set it back further when you're even more sure,

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and on the other hand, start preheating the room

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when you're predicting occupancy.

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So hopefully you never walk into a cold room,

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but do not require anyone to do any programming

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or connectivity or pay attention, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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people don't know how to do it, don't do it very well,

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patterns change and they forget how to do the programming.

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It's a nuisance to program and it doesn't work very well.

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And there's reasonable evidence anyway

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on requiring your attention persist much better,

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maybe up to the life of the device rather than

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maybe one to four years otherwise.

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So Radbot's magic is, I do love it when people ask me

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in a pitch or something and say,

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so how does it work?

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And I say magic with a completely straight face.

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Mainly light, there are other things going on as well,

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but stuff like when you flick on the light

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or draw your coat and the robot knows you're there,

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when it's pitch black and always is at that time,

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it can be pretty sure you're either not there or asleep

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and don't need the heat cranked up,

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but it also detects your use of controls.

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And there's other things in development

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right at this moment.

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And then that setback size, well, we risk weight it.

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The more sure we are, you're not in the room,

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the further we allow the temperature setback.

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And in the middle of the night, when we're pretty sure

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that you don't need the heat,

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we set it back as much as six degrees,

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which in principle would be a 60% energy saving

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to a rule of thumb.

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One degree setback for its duration is about 10%

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of the heat requirement for that duration.

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Brief history, oh, go back to 2009 or something,

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David McKay was writing Sustainable Energy

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Without the Hot Air.

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And we were talking about all sorts of things

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from solar panels onwards.

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And that's a tiny credit to me,

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somewhere in the depths of the book.

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When he got to DEC, he claimed he wrote himself

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the chief scientist role at DEC by writing that book.

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And we continue chatting about what was likely

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to be the best carbon bang for the buck.

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What should we do?

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I was very keen to do something.

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And we decided probably domestic space heating

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was really ripe for improvement.

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People do it really badly.

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Less than half the systems in England, for example,

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would meet current building regs.

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They wouldn't be allowed to be built.

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And those are pretty poor regs.

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He invited me to organize a meeting.

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He invited me to lead a meeting at the end of 2012

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about home heating, including zoning.

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The great and the good were there, academics

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and people from BRE and so on.

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We all agreed that zoning was good

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and probably some other things as well.

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So, and some chat from one of the big companies said,

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oh, and I'll send you all our kit, which does it.

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Well, nothing happened.

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And the government didn't do anything.

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I kind of sent a snippy email in January saying,

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well, what have you done?

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It's been months.

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You haven't done anything.

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And they said, we're government.

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We don't do anything in a hurry.

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So in 2013, I started the open CRV open source project,

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which is still there.

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And we'll talk about it in a minute.

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And in about 2014, created the company.

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And about 2018 got some really good investors on board.

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And we changed the name of the company

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to one that wouldn't frighten utilities and thus Vestemi.

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And we're commercializing it

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because it's no good being a boutique tinkerer.

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There's more than a billion rads,

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which should benefit from a rad bot.

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And we're not going to get there by tinkering.

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We need some real commercial oomph there.

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We've done testing.

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So Energy House, I don't know if any of you saw Energy House 2

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was launched today, which is rather good

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where they've got Energy House 1.

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They've got a whole Victorian end of terrace inside a lab.

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So we tested in there.

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So we're about 25% energy savings.

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And we just completed two years of trials

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with Bays and Off-Gem money in real houses,

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more than 100 real houses.

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And we've done other testing, qualitative testing.

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And yes, it works.

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We're pretty sure it actually works.

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It's not a figment of my imagination as the inventor.

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We're still arguing about how much it works

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because it's really difficult to measure.

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But we've got good numbers and our target is up to 30%.

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So what are we doing now?

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Sales, sales, sales.

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Every rad bot can save as much as a tenth

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of a ton of carbon per year from its rad.

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And there's quite good--

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oh, I've got a missing bracket there--

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in a few hundred bytes of code on an AVR.

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So that's what it looks like.

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You don't have to keep your finger on the rad bot.

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You are allowed to walk away.

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But that's the boost button on top, if you see.

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And I press it to close nice and red.

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Otherwise, it's just like a normal TRV.

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You set the temperature you want on the dial.

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And rad bot, when you're in the room,

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will do its standards to make sure that is the temperature.

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Clearly, it can't work miracles if your boiler isn't on or

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something.

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But it will do its standards.

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Rad bot will also, with a boiler controller,

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but it's not the way we're selling it,

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any rad bot can call for heat.

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And so if you do that boost, it will turn the boiler on for you.

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So some alphabets, alphabets spaghetti,

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SAP, GHD, ECo3, alphabet soup.

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So where would we be without TLAs and ETLAs?

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And for those who don't know, three letter acronyms and

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extended three letter acronyms.

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So we've had some pretty industry awards,

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like the one down in bottom right,

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which I seem to only got a monochrome version of.

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It was shiny, the original one.

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But the important thing was that at the very end of September,

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we went into the SAP tables.

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SAP is the standard assessment procedure,

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which, for example, drives your energy performance

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certificate for your house.

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And you need to get on that to go into all sorts of programs.

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And for example, now people can pay for rad bots under the green

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homes grant as a secondary measure.

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And the thing that we're currently pending is all our

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stuff is sitting with off gem to go and spot up on their fingers

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and toes and see if they will accredit us for the ECo3

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program.

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So how does it work?

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Well, I told you magic already, but maybe you won't believe me.

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It's just like a mechanical TRV for the normal human beings we

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want to use it.

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If we're going to get anything like a billion of them in,

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it can't be too fancy.

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So it's just like a mechanical TRV.

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And like a more normal mechanical TRV,

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one of its jobs is to stop overheating.

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And it quite took me by surprise to put one of our case studies,

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someone was in quite a new house, only six years old,

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which I assumed Radbot wouldn't be able to do much for.

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But they said that downstairs was always too hot,

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whatever they set their TRVs to.

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And upstairs was so cold that they

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had to run an electric heater.

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Well, they put TR of Radbots in, and it stopped both problems

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because it's presumably the one downstairs

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was close to their boiler.

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And Radbots really quite forceful about turning the Rad off

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when it wants to be.

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And it let more heat go upstairs when they wanted it.

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So fabs, so it can stop overheating as well as

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the other.

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It's got the boost button.

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Big problem that used to annoy me as I'm still school resources

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governor is come to pick my kids up on a cold winter's evening

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and see all the windows open because they're

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being a bit cold in the morning, turned everything up to max,

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forgotten, massively overheated, and they

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have to turn everything off, all the windows.

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So you press the boost button.

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It basically raises the temperature threshold

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for 10 degrees for half an hour and then goes back

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to where it was before, so you don't need to remember.

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Radbot is driven by occupancy and vacancy detection,

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including some optimum on, optimum off,

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a mixture of live detection and prediction.

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So it's got a kind of rolling seven day memory

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of various things like occupancy level, temperature, and so on.

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It's got multiple sensors, light, temperature,

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which it needs to regulate the room temperature, obviously,

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humidity.

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So we do some things to reduce condensation risk

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and use of controls.

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Outputs, it's got motor valve controls.

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There's a little motor which drives the pin up and down.

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And some haptics, I can do the equivalent of your phone

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vibrating to tell you something's going on.

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There's an LED at the top, and there's a radio.

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We are probably going to do a cheap one

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to get costs down with no radio fitted,

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but nonetheless, it is happy to send properly

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encrypted stats frames in JSON across the radio, which

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will get across a typical house, cheap radio.

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And there's some patent pending cleverness too.

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We are galloping towards an expedited patent

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of our first patent, which means it'll land in a year, we hope,

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and four other ones as well.

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So I'd have to kill you all if I tell you about some

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of the stuff that's pending.

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But lots of it is to do with making lots and lots of value

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out of the cheap sensors in here.

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These are not fabulously expensive,

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highly calibrated sensors, but we can do a lot with them.

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And so for example, when we use lighting to detect occupants,

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we're doing all sorts of things.

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We're doing edge detection.

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We're looking at how much it wobbles.

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We're looking at level detection.

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We look at what typical things are by hour of day and so on.

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Anyway, on savings in Energy House,

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which is this Victorian end of terrace inside a lab,

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we were seeing, for example, 60% savings of energy

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in the bedrooms, 25% for the whole house.

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We think realistic is 30% for houses for which it's suited.

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So if you're in a tiny one bedroom studio or studio flat,

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which is modern and well insulated,

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Redpot isn't going to help you much.

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It wouldn't in a passive house either,

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because zoning won't have much effect.

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But if you're in a big old draughty house which

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loses heat like the clappers, yes, Redpot is your friend.

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OK, some secrets for you.

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Now, you can tell me again if I could show you this again

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after we come off.

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I'm hoping you can see.

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I've just taken the lid off of Redpot,

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and you won't be able to see it.

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But inside the cap is a little row

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of pads there, which includes power and serial.

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So if you look at the Open TRV documentation,

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you'll see that there's a documented 4800 board 8N1

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serial interface with a CLI on it, which means you can do

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things like set the key and the ID

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and do some other bits and pieces.

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And any stats, as provided you've got the key.

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know the IDs, the existing open TRV stats hub and boiler controller received stats,

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and there is a little graph courtesy of new plot of occupancy from all the sensors, all

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radiative valves in my house a bit of last month. And if you look carefully, you can

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probably see the difference. I think that's a weekend first one, the kids in and the kids

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not in and different patterns of usage during the day, of course, under lockdown, a bit

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more occupancy that would otherwise be the case. So a summary, it's been an overnight

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success that took eight years. We've got we receiving accreditations, we've won some awards,

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we've got 1000 devices still in stock, we're hoping to make, well, 10s of 1000s, if not

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100,000 next year, we're ready for the green homes grant and eco three, or eco three sorry,

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is the energy company obligation. Third round of the program where the government pays to

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put improve the energy performance of the homes of people who are fuel poor or vulnerable.

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About a quarter of the population is eligible for that. Our aim is save mega tons of co2

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affordably and simply, we also aim to reduce fuel poverty to put up that horrible eating

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versus heating dilemma for some people. And we want to go on supporting tinkering in a

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way that doesn't terrify our investors. So there are some links for you the product has

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its own page radbot.com. There was a count Radbot if you go and search for Radbot in

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Wikipedia. Vestemi is the company. And if you want to go and look at the open TRV reference

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code which still exists the open source stuff that's in GitHub. And there's also a wiki

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on there. And if you want to drop me an email, there's my email address.