Energy Advisor

The Eliq Energy Advisor help consumers navigate the jungle of possible and available energy efficiency and savings measures by providing relevant and personalized recommendations for each individual Location.

By presenting recommendations that end users can take and helping them understand the positive impact each action would have on their energy consumption and cost– users are guided in what the next best thing to do in their location to save!

Eliq offers a large number of Advice and Recommendations that have been localized and are ready to present to your customers out-of-the-box. Eliq also supports adding, removing and editing all Advice content with customizable recommendations to present to your end users.

How does it work?

The Eliq Platform supports adding, configuring and maintaining a list of Advice that can be generated for each Location. Each advice can be configured to determine relevancy, such as which Location Profile Properties each advice is relevant to as well as other metadata. Each advice can be configured and translated to several languages.

A list of advice are generated and scored for each Location which in turn can be requested and presented to an end user in an app.

The end user can interact with each advice, setting a status to it or providing feedback that the advice is not relevant.

API

Get Advice for a Location

The Endpoint Get Advice is used to request all available advice and their data for an individual Location. The response returns a list of Advice that are relevant for the specified Location and sorted by the relevance score with the most relevant Advice first in the list. Each Advice in the list contains information and metadata to present to an end user in an app.

title and content is the text content for the Advice

Estimated Savings can be presented in both Energy and Cost as well as on the Locations total energy consumption or on an individual Energy Usage Category.

Advice savings can be calculated and returned for both Energy and Cost. These savings are aimed to help the end user understand and compare the Advice provided with each other to determine which Advice makes more sense to perform now vs. later.

Estimated Savings – Energy

estimated_early_savings_energy is the potential energy savings that the advice can offer in Wh on the complete yearly consumption for a Location

estimated_yearly_euc_savings_energy is the potential energy savings that an advice can offer in Whon the Energy Usage Category that the Advice is configured to be able to save energy for (if applicable).

Estimated Savings – Cost

estimated_yearly_savings_cost is the potential savings calculated in cost. This value is only returned if the Location has a set Price Formula that can be used to calculate Energy Cost.

Note! The property estimated_yearly_savings_cost has been deprecated! To show savings in cost. The property estimated_yearly_savings_monetary should be used in its place.

estimated_yearly_savings_monetary is an array that returns savings in cost. It and can return cost savings that are calculated using different methods.

1. If the Location has a price_formula that has been set through the Insights API or Data Management API, estimated cost savings will be calculated on the estimated energy savings using the price formula data and returned in the estimated_yearly_savings_monetary object.
2. Cost savings can also be returned in the object average, a calculation that will is done by multiplying the estimated_yearly_savings_energy with an average price per Wh and country value. Eliq has data on average prices per Wh for all EU countries. This information is less accurate than price_formula – based cost savings but can be valuable to present to end users to understand savings potential in Cost.

Estimated Savings – Sources

To help app developers understand and present information to end users in an app that explains how Cost Savings are calculated, a helper endpoint called Get savings monetary sources which can be called to get more information about the different estimated_yearly_savings_monetary types. If and when additional Savings Sources become available in the Eliq platform, this is where more details and information about those calculations will be made available.

Investment Cost and Return of Investment (ROI)

An Upgrade can have a fixed investment cost or a cost range added to it. This Investment cost is returned for each advice that has one and aimed to show the end user what investing in the upgrade will cost them.

Based on the investment cost and estimated savings, a Return of Investment (ROI) is generated and returned. This can show the end user how long time (in months) it is estimated that the investment will pay off based on the personalized estimated savings. ROI can be a range of minimum to maximum estimated n.o. months.

Financing Options

Some upgrades are expensive and may require a larger investment from the end user. To help end users take action and implement the recommended upgrade, it is possible to append available financing options to each upgrade. A financing option can be a loan or a subsidy and are optional to add to an individual upgrade if it makes sense to show the financing option with the upgrade.

A financing and subsidy advice is can be added to the Eliq platform on request with the help of your Eliq Client Success Manager.

Advice Link-out

Advice can contain a Link URL and a Link text that could be used to link-out the user to more information about the Advice or to start a Purchasing journey, redirecting the end user to a web URL with the right information for the Advice.

The Link text and Link URL can be added to each Advice as part of the content for the Advice.

For better insights on tracking link-out click-through-rates, the URL returned for each advice is an Eliq-generated URL which will redirect the end user to the Eliq platform to register a click through and thereafter redirect the end user to the correct, inputted URL.

Energy Usage Category saving (euc_key)

Some Advice, if implemented will help the consumer save energy in a specific Energy Usage Category (EUC). E.g. by reducing the temperature in a home by 1 degree, this would result in reduced energy usage for heating. If there is a category saving defined for an advice, the key will be available in the API response.

This makes it possible to support use cases such as “showing which category the advice will save energy for” as well as “provide a list of advice that can reduce Lighting costs”.

More details on the use cases can be seen below under “Use Cases”

Posting Advice Feedback – Status

The Endpoint Patch advice is used to post status for an individual Advice back to Eliq. Status on an advice is used to help end users set make their Advice more relevant. The following statuses are supported:

• none (Default)
• skipped
• save_for_later
• not_relevant
• already_implemented
• implemented

Algorithm

Based on Energy Data, Location Profile and End User Feedback, we create a list with the most relevant energy saving advice for each end user and estimate the saving potential in Wh and price.

1. Comprehensive advice bank for all types of homes:
   Eliq provides an up to date list of 100+ energy saving advice messages for different markets. Together with our customer, we review the advice and make sure they fit perfectly with our customers branding. This includes updating advice texts and adding or removing advice. The customer is 100% in control of the content.
2. Return the most relevant advice for each home:
   The Relevance Engine rates all advice on-demand and, taking several parameters into account when calculating and rating each advice so that the best advice is at the top of the list and the rest following in a descending manner. Parameters such as estimated savings potential, effort to implement and cost to implement . The list is dynamic and is continually updated taking into account the home profile, changes to the advice and each locations up-to-date energy data.
3. Personal Advice
   The savings potential provided for each advice, both in kWhs and Cost are calculated based on each locations energy usage and provide a personalised estimated savings potential to show the end user “how much you can save based on your historic and forecasted energy usage”, tailoring each advice to every user, providing a personal savings estimate.

Eliq has the capability to show all advice at once or send them out in batches for example top 4 advice.

Relevancy calculation

Eliqs platform ranks each advice with a relevancy score that is unique for each Location. Relevancy is based on the information set on each advice such as the required effort and cost to implement, the Locations Profile properties, the potential for energy saving and more.

The result is a list of highly personalized and relevant that can be presented as a ranked list of recommendations for every end user in an app.

Supported fuel types and Units

Advice are available for Electricity and Gas

Supported Location Profile Types

Advice are available for both Residential and Business Locations. For more information about Location Profile Types, please visit the Location Profile article

Requirements

Location profile requirement

Locations must have a Profile created to receive Advice. In order to receive as relevant Advice as possible, the more data that has been filled in for a Location Profile, the better.

Required data

A minimum of 1 month’s worth of data is required to start returning energy advice. The more energy data (12+ months) that is available and the more Location Profile options that are set, the more accurate the saving estimates will be and the more advice will be available.

Use Cases

Advice status

Each advice has one out of 6 statuses. Statuses are used to allow the end user to sort among the provided advice, adding advice that he or she wants to implement into a to do list, discarding advice that are not of interest, setting advice that have already been implemented prior to receiving the advice to “already implemented” and finally, setting implemented advice to “implemented” as a result of selecting, planning and implementing that suggested action.

By default, all advice have the status none. By creating UI that allows the user to discard unwanted advice, plan which advice that should be done and finally mark completed advice as done.

The statuses can be divided in to 4 main categories:

1. “New” advice
2. Advice “To do”
3. Advice that have been “Done”
4. Advice that have been “Discarded”

In the UI example below, the first 3 categories are shown in the top of the Energy Advisor screen, allowing the user to easily see a list of new advice, my to do list and my completed advice. The list of discarded advice is available on the screen but not as prominently, since they are not as important to access as the first 3.

Additionally, all advice are divided into “all advice”, “energy tips” and “upgrades” to allow the user to drill down into the respective list of advice.

Here is a description for each status and what they are for:

• none – This status is set as default for all advice. It indicates that the end user has not seen or interacted with the advice.
• skipped – This status indicates that the advice was shown to the end user but no feedback was received.
• not_relevant – This status is used to indicate that the end user has seen the advice but indicated that the advice is not relevant. We use this information to improve our algorithms.
• already_implemented – This status is used to allow the end user to indicate that this advice was already implemented, before seeing the advice in an app. It should be used to differentiate between an advice that was implemented as a result of seeing the advice in the app (implemented) or the advice being implemented earlier and not as a result of seeing the advice in the app (already_implemented).
• implemented – This status is used to indicate that the advice has been carried out. We capture this by asking if the advice has been implemented.
• save_for_later – This status indicates that the user has seen the advice and saved the advice for later. Users are not able to do everything at once. So creating a small todo list of advice is a good way to both capture feedback and keep users engaged.

Set advice to To Do

Setting an advice to “to do” is done by setting the advice to save_for_later. This is usually done from the new status but could be enabled from any status. For example if an end user wants to set a “discarded” advice to “to do”. It is recommended that the user can easily set an advice to “to do” directly from the list of “new” advice. In the example below, this is done by clicking on the little “plus icon” in the card for each advice.

Advice should also be able to be set to “to do” in the advice detail screen as shown below:

Discard Advice

Discarding an advice is important for the Eliq platform to receive feedback on which advice were not chosen to be implemented by the end user. This data is used to improve the energy advice content provided for all users in the platform.

There are several statuses which are related to “discarding” an advice but where the status have different meaning. The discard status include (read more about the details above):

• skipped
• not_relevant
• already_implemented

If a user does not want to set an advice to “to do” or set it to “done”, it should be “discarded”. If the user chooses to discard an advice, understanding why it was discarded is important. Therefore, a UI that allows the user to selected “discard”, followed by a UI that asks for some more details on why is recommended.

In the UI below, a user has selected to view an advice and decided to discard it. By clicking on the small icon on the top right of the advice screen, the user is asked for the reason why it has been discarded. The end user can select not_relevant, already_implemented if selecting the two first options and then clicking on Continue. If the user clicks on the “x” or selects “Other” and clicks on Continue, the status is set to skipped.

It is important to enable the collection of why advice are discarded but taking into advice that not all users may feel comfortable sharing information. Therefore, providing feedback is optional with the ability to choose “other” or click on the “x”.

New tips

New tips can be presented to users so they can put a status on the tip and appear in the energy advisor.

Cost Savings in Advice

Show cost & consumption savings to motivate users to take action

Financing option in upgrade advice

Financing options can be added to upgrade tips to help users take action on specific upgrades.

Show which Energy Usage Category the advice will save energy for

For an Advice, showing which Energy Usage Category that the advice will save energy for can be shown as a label icon for each advice

Show available advice for Energy Usage Categories

Connecting the Energy Usage Category (EUC) feature to the Energy Advisor can help end users understand their EUC as well as providing relevant actions which could help reduce energy usage for that particular category. By filtering out the euc_key from each advice, the end user can see 1 or more advice connected to the category

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