A Somerville startup could be the next big innovation in the burgeoning smart-home industry as its fuel monitor hits Kickstarter next week.
Tank Utility, the brainchild of former EnerNOC mechanical engineer Nick Mashburn, is coming out of stealth mode with its app-enabled propane meter just in time for the season of home-heating headaches.
Tank Utility is a small, Wi-Fi-connected device that clips onto fuel tank gauges to collect and report usage data to homeowners via a mobile app. Based out of Greentown Labs, a clean energy business incubator in Somerville, Tank Utility aims to make sure homeowners always have a full tank, sending notifications when fuel levels are running low and projecting when a refill is needed. It's a potentially useful innovation for anyone who doesn't make it a habit of checking their fuel levels daily.
And it's a potential life-saver for owners of seasonal vacation homes, with frozen pipes and flooding posing big risks to that investment. New England is ground zero for that market. There are 94,000 vacation homes in Massachusetts, 101,000 in Maine and another 100,000 in Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
In fact, Mashburn got the idea for Tank Utility when he bought a vacation cabin in the White Mountains, his first experience with a fuel-heated home.
"I asked around about how people manage their tank levels and the answers were 'meh,' " he said. "Nobody's created anything like that."
So Mashburn built his own remote monitor, and that became the prototype for Tank Utility. He's also lucky enough to have a live-in mobile developer. His wife, Gwen Heimburg, has recently spent her weekends and nights designing and programming Tank Utility.
Mashburn has taken an interesting approach to bring the product to market. Rather than looking to the venture capital community, he's going crowdfunding first.
He believes the Kickstarter campaign, beginning Oct. 22, is the path toward raising enough capital for manufacturing. It's certainly going to be a good bellwether for consumer interest in this type of device.
The stats are on his side, with more than $11 billion in annual residential spending on fuel heat and lots of room for more efficiency in that space. More than 8 million homes nationwide use fuel.
It's easy to envision Tank Utility being of interest to Nest and other home automation players, because as they say in "Game of Thrones" and here in New England: Winter is coming.
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