Vampires and phantoms as tormenting phenomena in nightmares terrify helpless victims, but who would say that they do so in the real world. Admittedly, in a somewhat different way and with different consequences, but the final outcome is the same – horror and dread. It is, in fact, about mysterious energy guzzlers that affect the rising costs of households and companies and thin the pockets of small and large consumers. Phantom or vampire energy refers to electrical and thermal energy that is wasted unnecessarily and unconsciously. For example, when lights are on and the cooling and heating device is turned on while no one is in the room, or televisions, computers, and printers are on even though we are not using them – yet we pay for all that consumption.
However, there is a solution. Behind it are Petar Janičić, director of the Croatian startup BeeHive Smart Gadgets (BeeHive SG), and Aleksandar Selakov, the company’s development director and a professor at the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad. They have invested two million euros so far in the development of their platform BeeHive PEB (Phantom Energy Buster – phantom energy buster), and about twenty experts in Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary are working on its development. The company already has offices in Zagreb, Vienna, Budapest, and Novi Sad.
Energy-efficient home
BeeHive SG was founded last year to simply and affordably provide all the features of a smart home, explains Janičić. The idea was born from family projects during the design and construction of real estate. In the pursuit of improving the quality of living and caring for commercial buildings, a smart home is the ideal solution, and years of experience in developing such solutions allowed, says Janičić, them to develop everything from hardware such as hubs, sensors, switches, outlets to communication protocols and control applications. Such an energy management system completely turns off devices in standby mode or switches them to lower consumption and allows for alleviating network overload.
– During the development of the smart home, Selakov’s professional and scientific experience with electrical distribution networks was extremely important so that we could develop a system that will not only monitor the home but also remotely contribute to cost relief, i.e., reducing or eliminating phantom consumption. We met while developing smart home solutions, and when founding the company, we used a bootstrap approach. This means that the initial investment in the development of our PEB platform was family-based, after which we started looking for investors. We wanted to translate ideas into products whose functionality we could demonstrate in a real environment so that investors could know that our system works. Examples in which the benefits of the platform can be best understood are precisely the redistribution of electrical energy. If we consider that five hundred households with average electricity consumption can save up to 1.02 MWh per day with our solution, we would save enough energy to charge about twenty electric cars. This is a significant relief for the network when, for example, in the summer months due to the arrival of tourists, among other things, we have more electric cars in the network – describes Janičić.
Monitoring consumption patterns
Selakov continues that the platform offers a solution that saves money for the end user, and for the electrical distributor, in addition to direct savings, it allows the network to become stable, flexible, and more resilient to anticipated circumstances such as upgrades, expansions, and improvements to the network, as well as unforeseen events. The electrical distributor can communicate with the platform and by reducing consumption on individual devices free up energy that it needs at that moment elsewhere. Selakov concludes that by saving vampire energy, not only is consumption reduced, but CO2 emissions are significantly decreased, and the saved energy can be redistributed, which increases energy efficiency.
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