4/12: Navigating Your Copper App

Navigating Your Copper App

Welcome to the fourth installment of Sterling Ranch's crash course on energy! In this email, we'll highlight our community partner Copper Labs and share information on how Sterling Ranch residents can best use their Copper Home Energy Monitoring App for energy action.

What is Copper?

Every home in Sterling Ranch comes standardly equipped with two Copper devices linked to your water meter and electric and gas meter and an account tied to your Lumiere email address. Your Copper devices capture the same radio frequencies that utilities use for billing and sends information about your utility usage to the cloud, where you can then access it in real time through your Copper app.

What's unique about Copper is the speed and accuracy with which you can see updates to your daily energy use, natural gas use, water use, and solar energy generation (if applicable). Historically, utilities have only been able to provide usage data to customers after the fact. But with Copper, you're able to view and adjust your utility use in real time, allowing you to change the track of your usage and see the impact of your actions in 15-minute increments. The data you receive in your app is billing grade - in fact, the water bills that you receive from the Community Authority Board are based off of your Copper data!

Video: Welcome to Copper

Copper's Home Energy Monitoring App

We'll provide some information on how to read your Copper app interface and highlight key points, but first, make sure you have it downloaded! The Copper app can be downloaded for free on Google Play or the Apple App Store.

If you need help getting your account set up in the app, follow this guide on the Lumiere website.

Moving Around Your App

We'll let Copper explain it best. Watch the following video for an introduction to the different pages and tabs in your Copper app.

Navigating Copper Mobile

How to Get the Most Out of Your App

Enable Notifications

Copper's personalized notifications are designed to contextualize your energy use, provide seasonal energy savings information, make you aware of demand response events, and alert you when you're using more energy than normal, but they can only do that if you allow them! Take full advantage of Copper's wireless real time management capabilities and enable notifications in your app settings.

Enable Beta Features and Set Goals

In your settings page, you also have the opportunity to enable beta features. Copper's beta features allow you to set weekly and monthly goals to target a percentage reduction in your energy use along with regular notification updates to help you make progress.

Check Your App Frequently

Copper gives you a visualization of your current energy use compared to your average energy use, so it's easy to tell how you're doing with your consumption on any given day. Acquaint yourself with your energy trends and learn what energy savings actions work best for you to make it easy to adjust your energy usage when you're using more than usual.

Tips for Energy Action

Experiment with seeing how your energy use can change in real time.
Open your app, view your current usage, and then take an action with an energy implication such as running an appliance or turning your AC up or down a few degrees. Check your app again in 15 minutes to see how your usage changed.
This exercise will give you a frame of reference for reading your Copper data visualizations and understanding the scale of impact that different energy actions have.
Consider setting a reminder every day before peak demand hours (3:00-7:00pm) to check your app and see if you're using more energy than usual. If you are, this check in will give you the opportunity to adjust your usage to get back on track.