BOULDER — For a company that wasn’t really advertising its product, the renewable power monitors created by an 18-month-old Boulder manufacturer are selling pretty well.

“We have roughly about 400 installations,” said Greg Greenan, who is running the sales and marketing side of eGauge Systems LLC. “But we’re positioned now to go into a much faster growth rate.”

Until now, the company relied on word-of-mouth to sell its monitoring products. Although the majority of those sales were for residential solar installations, the company has developed some important municipal clients, such as Boulder County, the city of Boulder and the Denver Botanical Gardens, plus corporate clients.

Now that the products have passed UL and ETL safety compliance tests, Greenan said, the time has come to let the cat out of the bag.

“We’re going to be participating in large international solar shows and actively calling on distributors to sell to solar installers,” he said. “Beyond that we will ultimately be setting up an online store.”

David Mosberger, with a doctorate in computer science and a long record of product development at Hewlett-Packard Development Co. LP, originally designed the device after he found no acceptable energy monitors for a photovoltaic solar system he installed in his home about three years ago. Some of his neighbors were among the first clients for a company that didn’t actually exist until months later, and eGauge had plenty of other users and installers around to test a fledgling product.

eGauge’s monitoring solution works for several kinds of renewable energy, including wind and geothermal power, but the major difference between it and other monitors on the market is the product isn’t limited to measuring only the power generated.

eGauge also monitors the power a home or business takes in from the grid and can monitor separate circuits that may be responsible for the majority of the power use.

“Not only do we tap into what power you are producing and what you are drawing from the grid, but (with each monitoring device) you can add in nine more circuits to see what else is driving energy demand,” Greenan said. The city of Boulder, “is monitoring solar and usage to stay below peak rates, and they’ve been successful cutting their costs and staying below peak rates.

“Most systems only give you one half of the information you need.”

So the main monitoring unit produced by eGauge can measure energy used for air conditioning and refrigeration or heat, or actually monitor separate units of an apartment building. Importantly, the units can also be used in combination, so there are an almost unlimited number of uses that can be monitored.

The main pieces of the monitoring solution, which tracts use by the second and can be accessed by personal computers and cell phones, cost about $700 with installation. Individual current transformers, needed to monitor separate circuits, such as an air-conditioning unit, cost about $25 each.

“The device fits in the circuit breaker on your house and within the device are data loggers and Web browser,” Greenan said. “No one else is hosting that information and no one else has to see that.”

In cases where it makes sense the information is easily shared. For instance, the botanical gardens uses the information to create a kiosk display that shows kilowatt hours of electricity generated, carbon monoxide reductions from the atmosphere and how many miles driving a car were offset by the solar-electric generation there.

But installers can access the information of their systems to check on system performance, finding problems even before their client knows anything is wrong. The company also provides a solution — it doesn’t charge for data transfer — for installers to monitor numerous accounts.

Greenan said about a dozen solar installers are using the product now. “Any configuration can be done remotely, so they aren’t up on a roof with a computer. Once it’s installed they get a green light, and they’re done.”

In Boulder, eGauge has four employees, including Greenan and Mosberger, who complete the final assembly, software installation and testing of the units.
“But we’ve kept the time needed for that low (at about 15 minutes per device), so we’re ready to gear up very quickly,” Greenan said.