From Guesswork to Smart Savings: An Energy Efficiency Breakthrough

Left unchecked, heavy snowfall on a roof can cause ice dams along the roof’s bottom edge.

When that happens, melted snow on the roof’s surface travels backward under shingles and into a structure. The resulting damage can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars. 

Heat cables, when used correctly, can effectively clear channels through the snow along a roof’s edge, preventing this from happening. There are approximately 44 million runs of heat cable across the United States and the owners of those heat cables spend, on average, hundreds of dollars per month to protect their roof. 

A Better Way To Heat

Theoretically, building or home owners can temporarily shut off the cables and save power once the snow and ice has melted. The challenge is knowing when heat cables have successfully melted drainage channels, and when to power the cables back on. 

Park City, Utah-based Powder Watts wanted to create a solution to eliminate the guesswork required for switch-flipping owners. While solutions existed on the market, the Powder Watts team didn’t like the real-world performance of the existing home and business automation protocols like Zigbee and Z-Wave.

According to Thomas Clardy, founder and CEO of Powder Watts, a smart system - one relying on IoT technology - would have to employ protocols to effectively communicate data about when to power heat cables on and off. 

Solving the Smart Switch Challenge

When the Powder Watts team came to Grid Connect, they had created a smart rooftop sensor and the AI to monitor heat cables. What they were missing was a way to power the cables on and off the cables based on data from the rooftop smart sensor and AI.

“Nobody made a long-range high-amp smart switch capable of monitoring energy,” says Clardy. “We didn’t want to run our system on W-iFi, so Grid Connect incorporated our long-range protocol leading to outstanding performance.”

Grid Connect engineers were able to develop two smart switches - one, 30-amp, 240-volt for commercial use and one, 120-volt for home use - that could be controlled via the Powder Watts mobile app. This allowed for energy monitoring and independent socket switching. These switches allowed for precise and individual segment control of cables -reducing energy usage by up to 90% for homeowners!

Revolutionizing Communication with Proprietary Protocols

However, the design challenges didn’t stop there.

The Powder Watts system consists of five elements:

• a rooftop smart sensor and camera to detect snow
• a smart hub for receiving and sending signals
• a smart switch to measure energy usage and turn the heating cables on and off
• AI to evaluate conditions and make switching decisions
• the Powder Watts App to enable full customer insight and control

Each element communicates with the others across a long-range that made traditional protocol choices difficult to use.. According to Clardy, LoRaWAN, the most popular protocol for this application, didn’t have the throughput to handle the HD images the Powder Watts system needed. 

Additionally, Grid Connect was able to provide a proof of concept design for a solar powered smart camera utilizing Powder Watts’s proprietary communication protocol to efficiently transmit the necessary HD images over long distances.

Delivering Reliable Performance and Exceptional Savings

Ultimately, Grid Connect helped Powder Watts bring the most robust, commercially available IoT cable monitoring system to market - capable of withstanding up to -40 F, extreme summer heat and severe hail. 

These innovations provide users full control and monitoring capabilities via the Powder Watts mobile app, ensuring reliable performance and significant energy savings. Users typically see a return on investment in 12-24 months.

“If you own a home or business and you’re spending $200 or more per month to power your heat cables, Powder Watts can reduce that by up to 90 percent,” notes Clardy.