EcoFactor is an energy management software start-up that recently won a Cleantech Open award. It aggregates data abut your home’s energy use and gives a grade for each zone of the house. The grade reflects how sealed a building is and its energy efficiency levels. While the grade is based on the home, it of course reflects on the owner and we know there are some people who just have to be straight A students. Luckily, EcoFactor also likes straight A students. So when one efficiency-minded customer called in from Dallas saying that his grade was a D and that EcoFactor absolutely had to be wrong because “I don’t get D’s,” the company was quick to get to the root of the issue. And it turns out there were skeletons in his attic he’d never known about.
EcoFactor was pretty confident that the program works, so they sent out an HVAC technician to evaluate and give feedback. As Scott Hublou, founder of EcoFactor told us, it was clear that either the math around EcoFactor’s grading system was wrong, which the team was quite certain it wasn’t, or something is wrong with the house, which the customer, Wade Hyde, was quite certain there wasn’t.