1. Enter information about you – your zip code, your savings goal etc.
2. Enter information from your electricity bill – rate and historical usage
3. Take a quick inventory of your home’s HVAC, appliances, lightbulbs etc.
4. Follow the daily recommendations presented to you based on items and appliances in your house, the time of day, weather and other factors.
5. See the impact of recommendations in both dollars saved and carbon reduced so you can understand the long term implications of small actions.
6. Track your progress over time.
7. Share results with your friends through Twitter.

A key initiative for utilities and regulators is helping consumers use less energy and make better choices about when and how to consume energy. Many industry participants are working to design and deploy programs around smart metering, home energy management, pricing incentives etc. to provide information, incentives and feedback to change behavior.

The problem is, the technology to manage these programs is expensive and requires attention, time, and sophistication to make them work. For example, setting up a home energy monitoring network, attaching it to a smart meter, and making changes based on the information can cost hundreds of dollars and take at least a day to install and configure.

Using tools (Smartphones) and data (monthly usage, energy savings benchmarks, and pricing info) that are already available is a faster and cheaper way to help an important sub-segment of the energy consumers achieve a significant portion of these benefits.

Since the cost is so low, all the benefits of energy conservation accrue to the end-user.

The iPhone functionality of MyEnergyTips delivers the following main elements:

• User Profile:  The user enters a minimal set of information including monthly usage history and energy price (easily found on the bill), conservation target, and climate zone.
• Home Audit: Create a “home profile” by selecting from a list of appliances, lights, HVAC etc. that are in a house.  The key here is no data entry, only the selection of items to include which significantly improves usability.
• Recommendation Generation:  Each time the user consumer opens the application, a set of custom recommendations based on the audit, weather conditions and other factors are generated. The user then takes those actions and then taps on the list item to register it as “done.” Each action taken adds a savings amount both in dollars and carbon avoided that is added to the users performance to date total.
• Tracking: From the tracking tab the user can view performance for each month against the goal, the percentage of actions taken, as well as the results of the audit by device type. From this screen, the user can share results to their Twitter account.
• Alerts: At set times during the day, the application generates an alert for the user to check out their recommendations.

The combination of easy set-up, real data associated with recommendations, and feedback makes the application easy to use and effective. Since the cost is low, all the benefits of energy conservation accrue to the user.

MyEnergyTips is also available as a platform for utilities, manufacturers, and retailers to add their own branding and content to the app to help engage their customers. By providing a useful tool, these companies will earn the right to present targeted messages and links to purchase energy efficient goods.