With science and software, energy efficiency audits made easier
Date: 06/28/2010
Company: Recurve
Source: SmartPlanet
How do you distinguish your home efficiency services company? You develop software that helps make your more efficient at energy audits and home performance audits. Then you raise $8 million from the world’s second largest home improvements retailer to help market and distribute the application nationwide.
That’s the story of Recurve, a six-year-old home performance contracting company from San Francisco founded by energy efficiency expert, Matt Golden. “There are answers to how houses work, but they are housed on lab paper. Building science needs to scale,” says Golden, who holds positions on all sorts of national board devoted to energy efficiency, including Efficiency First.
In order to help shave off three to five hours from the audits that retrofitters typically do before coming up with an energy efficiency plan for your house, Recurve developed a tablet-based application that runs either online through a web browser or offline. (Sorry folks, because the software runs certain simulations in the background, it doesn’t work on an Apple iPad.) The software typically is used on netbooks.