ZEN: A Smart Thermostat Designed for Service Providers

The list of digital, internet-connected, smart thermostats available to homeowners and businesses grows every day.One of the most recent entrants is the Zen thermostat, which has undergone testing by Comcast for the last two years and is now also piloting with cable provider Cox Communications.The thermostat, a product of Zen Within, is designed to be especially simple to install and set up. It does not have as many features as some other thermostats, such as extra sensors. To catch the notice of service providers, however, it was important that the backend was not a proprietary system that made it difficult to work with other systems, such as Comcast's Xfinity home platform, which had been a problem with some other thermostats.Internet service providers "are looking for something that could plug right into their system without policing policies of somebody's cloud," said James McPhail, executive vice president of sales for Zen Thermostat. "We are working on providing that high level of ease of use."With all of the options in the market, Comcast has not been alone in shopping around. Last year, Alarm.com designed its own thermostat. It didn't feel as though any products on the market fully integrated into its platform in the way it wanted. Zen is also piloting with Cox. Both Cox and Comcast use Icontrol's platform for their smart home offering.There is a balance between offering customers a sleek, high-tech thermostat and a basic offering that appeals to consumers who simply want a slightly better thermostat than their 20-year-old programmable unit that they never programmed in the first place. It's a delicate proposition. Providers want to impress consumers with new products, but the thermostat is not just a nice add-on to a smart home -- it is a critical piece of infrastructure.Comcast has just started dabbling in bring-your-own-thermostat programs, something it would like to do more of. Comcast's demand response capability is enabled by Ecofactor, the hardware-agnostic software company behind the EcoSaver option for Xfinity Home thermostats.Zen has made inroads in some of the largest bring-your-own-thermostat territories in California and recently joined the OpenADR Alliance. The company is working with EnergyHub, one of the major aggregators of bring-your-own residential thermostat programs, to help fulfill some of the capacity awarded as part of California's Demand Response Auction Mechanism, known as DRAM. The Zen thermostat is also a hardware option in Nevada Power's mPowered program.Zen has dreams beyond being the thermostat of choice for the service provider market and an active player in bring-your-own-thermostat utility programs. It would also like to be a top choice for the small and medium-sized business market, which only has a few tailored options, such as enTouch. The company is working with demand-side energy optimization company Encycle (formerly Regen Energy). McPhail formerly worked at Regen, as well as EnerNOC.Similar to the appeal for service providers, Encycle can offer the thermostat as a more elegant piece of hardware compared to some of the other options for the small commercial market. Instead of the Zen having its own app, it is integrated into the Encycle app for a more seamless experience.Zen is also selling directly to some national chains, such as Pier 1. McPhail also serves as a board member for Enersponse, a demand-side management company that focuses on demand response aggregation for the small and medium-sized business market, which is vastly underserved.McPhail said Enersponse has devices participating in capacity markets through the three large investor-owned utilities in California. Besides building channel partners to be a player in the small and medium-sized business market, Enersponse also hopes to be awarded DRAM capacity in the next auction.