TORONTO – ecobee, the smarter wi-fi thermostat company, today launched Donate Your Data, a new program that allows customers to voluntarily contribute their home data to advance energy efficiency research. Historically, these studies have been undertaken with very small groups of homes. As a leading smart home company, ecobee has created a unique opportunity to engage more than one million customers to share data, anonymously and securely, with leading research organizations to advance innovations in energy efficiency.

Donate Your Data will share anonymized information – including basic home details such as age, size and occupancy as well as reporting on indoor and outdoor temperatures, HVAC usage and occupant preferences. Data will be shared with leading academic, governmental and NGO research partners across North America.

“Our customers want more than just savings on their energy bill; they want to make a difference,” said Stuart Lombard, President and CEO of ecobee. “With Donate Your Data, ecobee customers have the potential to supply an incredible amount of data that directly supports some of the most sophisticated advancements in energy efficiency, which is core to the mission ecobee was founded on.”

Donate Your Data provides a turn-key solution for research partners, at a scale previously out of reach. The program leverages the ecobee thermostats installed across North America and gives ecobee customers the chance to opt-in to support leading scientists and researchers studying home energy use. The program will produce a large-scale data set on home heating and cooling, upon which researchers can build their energy efficiency studies, accelerating the pace of innovation in technology, program and policy design.

“This customer dataset is truly unique, said Alan Meier of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “We are looking forward to gathering deeper insights on how people manage their home heating and cooling. This is the type of data that will accelerate our research and help us identify further home energy efficiency opportunities.”

ecobee will invite its customer base to engage beginning today and has already recruited research partners including ‎the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carleton University, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Resources for the Future and Toronto Atmospheric Fund.

Their work helps build government programs that will save homeowners energy and money, by continuing to improve residential energy efficiency. ecobee continues to recruit new partners and customers into the program.

“ecobee is establishing a form of public engagement that we have never seen before; it is a groundbreaking cross-sector partnership model to advance our understanding of how we use energy and engage with new technologies,” said Jennifer Thorne Amann of The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “Donate Your Data shows that there is a growing understanding that people, companies and civil society can collaborate effectively.”

ecobee aims to collect data from more than a million customers in North America; the company is also actively seeking additional research and data partners for the program. To learn more, visit: www.ecobee.com/donateyourdata.

About ecobee
ecobee Inc. introduced the world’s first smart wi-fi thermostat to help millions of consumers save money, conserve energy and seamlessly bring home automation into their lives. The newly launched ecobee3 has been praised for its pioneering room sensor technology to deliver comfort in the rooms that matter most, its simple touchscreen interface and native mobile app, leading it to become a top-selling smart thermostat on the market today and achieve a No. 1 ranking on Navigant’s Smart Thermostat Leaderboard. Find out more at ecobee.com.