Copper Labs’ customer-facing mobile app provides real-time energy and water insights, offers personalized and timely feedback, and provides a direct channel for utility outreach.
Going beyond simply tracking energy and water use to actively empowering consumers with actionable insights, the Copper mobile app is a standout energy management and customer engagement tool. And it provides a flexible new channel for utilities to engage their customers in emerging areas such as load flexibility or new time-varying rate structures.
Real-time energy and water monitoring
The Copper Labs mobile app provides near real-time energy usage data directly from the customer’s meters. While other energy monitors use third-party metering or sensors, resulting in usage data that might not match customer bills, Copper’s approach ensures that the customer and utility are always looking at the same data.
The availability of granular, near-real-time data greatly improves on smart meter-based apps which can often only provide hourly or daily updates. This timely feedback enables consumers to see the immediate impact of turning on appliances, adjusting thermostats, or changing their usage habits, and to respond quickly to water leaks or spikes in energy use.
Personalized energy insights and recommendations
Copper Labs’ app goes beyond basic monitoring by offering personalized, timely insights and recommendations, goal-setting, and community comparisons. Where other energy apps or utility portals often offer generic advice—or simply present raw meter data—Copper focuses on relevant and actionable suggestions that cater to each household’s unique consumption habits.
Customers can get timely alerts about abnormal usage (such as a water leak), and receive mid-month usage reports to flag the potential for high bills and help them plan ahead for the remainder of the billing period. It also provides a unique channel to help utilities suggest specific, personalized, and actionable actions to reduce energy waste, participate in relevant utility demand-side management programs, or shift usage to off-peak times.
Equitable engagement to drive load flexibility
Copper’s mobile app enables utilities to directly engage customers around demand response or load flexibility in the moments that matter most, while maximizing user choice and customer equity. Direct interaction with utility programs turns consumers from passive users into active participants in energy management.
Customers can receive notifications about peak demand periods, and the app allows them to voluntarily participate in reducing electricity or gas consumption during those times. This can help users save on utility costs and actively contribute to grid management efforts. It even opens the door to immediate, performance-based incentives that reward customers based on the results of their efforts while providing better transparency to utilities about the impacts delivered. And because Copper’s outdoor hardware doesn’t rely on customer Wi-Fi, it allows everyone to participate—even those without smart home devices or robust home internet access.
Transparency and trust-building
Copper goes beyond just showing consumption; it helps users understand the “why” behind their energy usage patterns, building a deeper connection with their consumption behavior and its broader impact.
Copper’s app emphasizes transparency in energy and water monitoring, allowing users to better understand how their usage translates into costs and environmental impacts, and what new time-varying rate structures mean for them. This transparency fosters improved trust between consumers and their utility, and supports a deeper connection to relevant utility offerings.
