Case Study: Mevris AI helps Orient Customers cut their Air Conditioning costs by 79%
Our journey with Mevris began in the summer of 2017 when a team of BlueEast engineers retrofitted an Orient DC Inverter Air Conditioner at a customer’s home.
To help ease the skeptical looks of the customer our team asked him what motivated him to become the first customer of Mevris enabled Air Conditioner. He quickly replied “Energy Metering! DC Inverters are expensive… I want to make sure, I am getting the energy savings promised by DC Inverter Technology”. The feedback resonated with everyone at BlueEast.
Years of Energy Crisis: 2017 and 2018
When we launched Mevris as an IoT platform back in 2017, the energy crisis was in full swing in Pakistan. At one point electricity generation had shrunk by up to 50% due to an over-reliance on fossil fuels. The country was hit by its worst power crisis in 2007 when production fell by 6000 Megawatts and massive blackouts followed suit. By 2018, Load shedding, power blackouts, and brownouts had become a part of daily life in Pakistan with shortage peaking at 9000 Megawatts.
Responding to the energy crisis, Pakistan’s air conditioner market became 80% DC Inverter and 20% Fixed Speed while the international market stood at 60% DC Inverter and 40% Fixed Speed.
The DC Inverter Air Conditioners are generally 40% to 50% more expensive than their Fixed Speed counterparts. People wanted to know if they were getting value for money while investing in DC Inverters.
Economic Crisis of 2019
Last year (2019) has been generally marred with the economic crisis that caused Year-on-Year inflation in Pakistan to reach 12.3%. Adding fuel to fire, Pakistan was forced to increase electricity prices multiple times during the year due to IMF program requirements.
Pakistan’s air conditioner market became 96% DC Inverter and 4% Fixed Speed by the summer of 2019.
Delivering REAL Value to Customers
The vision behind the Mevris IoT platform from day one was always to provide our customers with REAL value using the 4th Industrial Revolution technologies.
The feedback from our first customer has always been a guiding star for all the development that has always gone into Mevris.
Responding to the deepening energy and economic crisis, Mevris Product Development Team decided to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help our customers reduce their air conditioning costs.
Mevris Predictions
In mid-2018, BlueEast introduced the Predictions feature into the Mevris platform which helped our customers to visualize the relation between thermal comfort and energy consumption.
The prediction models behind Mevris Predictions use the energy metering data of individual air conditioners. The insights let people know how much energy and time would it take to reach a certain thermostat temperature set-point at that point of the day with internal and external weather conditions.
The predictions created a lot of awareness among the energy-conscious air conditioner customers. We started getting a lot of positive feedback from the customers as they began realizing energy savings by sensible use of the air conditioners.
Abdul Rehman Talat (Chairman and CEO of BlueEast) was not satisfied, he wanted to automate the energy-saving and package it into a service that people could just subscribe and leave the energy-savings to Artificial Intelligence.
Mevris Autopilot
In 2018 Engineering Team experimented with the implementation of energy-saving as a service at one of the leading multinational banks with nationwide branches across Pakistan. The implementation was aimed to achieve at least 20% electricity bill reduction across the nationwide bank branches. The team out-performed it-self and achieved savings north of 43% in some branches.
The data gathered from the implementation at banks became the basis of our next innovation. At the beginning of 2019, BlueEast Engineering Team embarked on a very ambitious and one-of-a-kind Artificial Intelligence-based energy-saving algorithm. We named it Mevris Autopilot.
Just like the several fitness-cardio programs on an advanced treadmill at gyms which focus on different aspects ranging from endurance building to weight loss to fat loss. Mevris Autopilot gives our customers to make automatic Ai based trade-offs between comfort, convenience, energy savings, and resource management depending on the specific situation and needs of a particular air conditioner installation.
The Results
At the beginning of every new year, the data science team at BlueEast generates insightful analytics on Mevris platform performance as well as impact made on the daily lives of our customers during the last year.
Naturally, this time we were all anxious to find out how our Autopilot performed!
Mevris Customers have reduced their monthly air-conditioning energy consumption to 81 KWh (July 2019) from 390 KWh (July 2018). That is a 79% reduction reported from the raw anonymous data-sample.
A deeper inspection reveals that Mevris Customers also optimized their air conditioning run-time from 146 hours (July 2018) to 119 hours (July 2019). This indicates a reduction of air-conditioning usage by 18%.
Accounting for reduced run-time of air conditioners, July of 2018 saw an average power demand of 2.67KW while it got reduced to 0.68KW in July of 2019. Thus, the adjusted energy consumption reduction stands at 75%.
Commenting while reviewing the Mevris Autopilot performance, Mr. Abdul Rehman Talat, Charman and CEO of BlueEast said, “Mevris platform is living up to its promise of educating and helping the consumers in optimal-way of using their air-conditioners while ensuring comfort as well as energy savings”.
It started with Value creation: Energy Metering
This success story started with our first customer who ignored everyone in his home and started playing with Mevris App as soon as his airconditioner became online on the Mevris platform. We observed he was attracted to the insights and visualizations that Mevris provided.
Apart from analytics and data visualization, Mevris also provides online control on the go along with the timeline of activities and events taking place on the smart air conditioner.
Asad Bukhari, Head of Marketing Operations at Orient Electronics also simplified this mechanism of Mevris:
“The energy metering information available for our Ultron Series DC Inverter Air-conditioner is similar to the ECO mode indicator in modern cars that let drivers know if they are pressing the accelerator pedal in an optimum way.”
Impact on Customers Daily Life
Our customers are now more confident and enlightened regarding their air conditioning usage than those who haven’t installed the Mevris App.
Most of the consumers in the past used to set their thermostats at 16C which is, in fact, neither achievable nor comfortable. So, the air conditioners, despite being DC inverters, kept running at max-power to achieve this impractical temperature. Consequently, making their electricity bills to escalate. Now with the proper knowledge and artificial intelligence of Mevris comfort and energy savings are both are balanced.
What’s Next?
With this experience of successful implementation of Artificial Intelligence in solving REAL-LIFE problems — We at BlueEast plan to launch a complete ecosystem of IoT solutions in both Smart Home and Industrial applications in 2020.
The solutions will focus on providing a world-class experience to our customers while focusing on localized unique problems.
