Energy Donkey - What's The Hee-Haw?
A genius product with a memorable name? What would it be like to have your own personal engineer on hand - for every stupid question.
Are heat pumps easy to set up? No.
Are heat pumps easy to run? Not really.
Have manufacturers done enough to make the operation of a home's heating simple?
These are the sorts of questions that the team at Energy Donkey had in mind. Which is why they created the Donkey.
But what the hell is it?
Graham Hendra - Known But Not Yet Famous
For those who aren't embedded in the heating industry, the name Graham Hendra will draw a blank. Outside of a coterie of influential heating engineers and system designers, Graham is the sort of unassuming man who you might pass every day in the street.
In real life when you meet him, he's charming, demure and open-minded. And he loves old cars and bikes. He has 'Dad' vibes.
That is until you ask him a question about his favourite subject.
Engineering.
Then, 'you're not in Kansas Dorothy', you get a different experience. Graham is regarded not just in the UK, but worldwide, as a leading authority on the technology that runs thousands and millions of heat pumps.
Graham is the man behind the curtain, holding the levers of what Energy Donkey has become.
And Then There Is The Donkey
Let's deal with the name.
Energy Donkey.
It sounds less like the future of intelligent home energy management and more like something you'd find in a hiker backpack up a mountain - out in nature.
The launch didn't exactly attempt to correct that impression.
There was an actual donkey. There were sketches. There was Graham running through fields. There was a deliberately odd, homespun quality to the whole thing which felt a long way from the immaculate product photography, reassuring pastel colours and carefully sanitised corporate language normally used to sell energy technology.
That is deliberate.
Leah Smith, who Marketing Manager at Energy Donkey, told me:
"The industry as a whole is very, I would say, sort of stuffy and very sort of polished."
And the Donkey is supposed to be the opposite.
"Energy Donkey is almost a fun take on that... it's memorable."
She's right about that.
I have spent years writing about products with names involving some combination of Eco, Green, Heat, Smart, Sun and Energy. Half an hour later I sometimes struggle to remember which one I've just interviewed.
Nobody forgets Energy Donkey.
The danger, of course, is that underneath the donkey, the jokes and Graham running through a field is something considerably more serious.
Because Energy Donkey isn't really about donkeys.
It's about attempting to fix one of the biggest unresolved problems in the transition to electrified heating.
The machines are getting smarter. The experience of using them makes you feel dumb.
It's waiting for your questions...https://energydonkey.com/
The Translation Problem
A modern heat pump can expose an extraordinary amount of information.
Flow temperatures. Return temperatures. Weather compensation curves. Compressor behaviour. Electrical consumption. Heat output. Schedules. Set points. Coefficients of performance.
All tremendously useful.
Unless you're the person who just wants the kitchen to be warm at seven o'clock in the morning.
Leah describes the problem rather neatly:
"You start talking about... flow rates and all these different numbers, and the general person wouldn't necessarily understand it."
Energy Donkey's proposed answer is to ditch the instruction manual.
And start a conversation.
"What we did with Energy Donkey is we built it in a way which was user-friendly, i.e. the average homeowner can understand what the hell this means."
Will it work?
The consumer shouldn't necessarily have to learn the language of the machine. The machine should become capable of speaking the language of the consumer.
So is it just another chatbot - no.
Ask The Donkey
At its simplest level, Energy Donkey is an AI system trained around specialist energy knowledge.
Leah describes it as:
"An AI platform which allows users, primarily being homeowners and/or installers, to communicate directly with not only just their own heat pump but the industry or the renewable industry as a whole."
At the moment, the centre of that knowledge is Graham.
The team has taken his published material, technical knowledge and experience and put it into the system.
Leah's rather brilliant description is:
"Energy Donkey is a fancy brand over Graham Hendra's brain."
Which creates an interesting proposition.
If you're thinking about buying a heat pump, you can ask it questions.
Would a heat pump work in my house?
What will it cost?
What does this terminology mean?
Why would an installer specify this?
Once a heat pump is connected, however, their is a gear change.
The system has three levels - Knowledge, Connect and Control. The latter two use Planet Devices' Atmo gateway to connect Energy Donkey to the heat pump.
Graham Hendra ABC Heat Pumps
The Atmo website
Then the conversation stops being simply about your heating system.
It can become a conversation with it.
Turn it on.
Turn it off.
Change a schedule.
Interrogate its data.
Eventually, potentially, commission it.
And that is where the Donkey stops being funny.
The Difference
The UK has spent enormous effort trying to improve the machines being installed into people's homes.
But there is another part of the transition which receives considerably less attention.
Who operates all this stuff?
A gas boiler was, from the consumer's perspective, brutally simple.
Hotter.
Colder.
On.
Off.
The electrified home is heading in the opposite direction.
Heat pump. Solar PV. Battery. EV charger. Time-of-use tariff. Smart meter. Export tariff. Energy management system.
Each may have its own controller.
Its own app. Its own terminology. Its own login.
Its own idea about what constitutes a sensible user interface.
And sometimes its own opinion about what the other devices should be doing.
Even heat-pump controllers alone can be remarkably unintuitive.
Leah doesn't dodge that:
"Control systems are painfully difficult to understand."
And later:
"Controllers... are incredibly complicated to understand, navigate, use, and obviously use correctly."
So I asked the obvious question.
Are we witnessing the beginning of the death of the controller?
Her answer was cautious.
"I think so... potentially."
Perhaps the physical controller doesn't disappear.
But the way we interact with it might.
Because if I can say:
"Why was my house cold this morning?"
and the Donkey can examine what the heat pump actually did overnight and explain the answer in English, that's fundamentally different from scrolling through eleven menus looking for a number I don't understand.
Better still:
"Can you stop that happening tomorrow?"
That is where semantic control of energy becomes interesting.
It Could Also Help The People Installing Them
There is another human buried underneath this problem.
The installer.
A good installer doesn't simply install a heat pump, collect the money and disappear.
They get phone calls.
In fact, many installers make bespoke WhatsApp groups that their engineers answer routine questions in. That's ok if you have the time. But...
Leah says this is already a recognised problem:
"They are inundated."
And the difficulty is that those questions are legitimate.
"They appreciate how much of a significant investment it is from a homeowner. So they have a right to ask these questions."
Which creates a peculiar productivity problem.
The better an installer is at supporting customers, the more time the installer can potentially spend supporting customers instead of installing heat pumps.
Energy Donkey wants to absorb some of that burden.
More significantly, it is developing remote commissioning.
"It can be done remotely."
That matters because commissioning isn't an administrative afterthought.
Get it wrong and the expensive machine bolted outside someone's house may never perform as intended.
If an intelligent platform can help installers identify poor settings, commission systems remotely and continue monitoring performance afterwards, Energy Donkey starts looking less like a chatbot and more like infrastructure.
But Here's The Problem
All of that requires trust.
And trust becomes much more complicated when software stops telling you things and starts doing things to your house.
Ask an AI system what weather compensation means and an incorrect answer is annoying.
Allow one to alter the operation of a £10,000 heating system in January and the consequences become rather more tangible.
Energy Donkey says it was internally tested for several months before launch and that testing continues. Leah said the company has visibility over questions and answers and provides a mechanism for users to flag problematic responses.
But one of my questions exposed an important unresolved issue.
Graham Hendra has opinions.
That's not a criticism. Experts have opinions precisely because they have accumulated experience.
But an AI system needs to know the difference between Graham saying this is a fact and Graham saying this is what I think good engineering looks like.
I asked Leah how Energy Donkey separates the two.
"I'm not sure myself, but I can ask that question for sure."
A few moments later she was admirably more direct:
"The source data is split into two distinct pots; factual public information and Graham's professional experience. Neither contain opinion. The two are combined to form a coherent response for the user, leaning on a mix of dry manufacturer data sheets, peppered with factual real-world experience."
That is actually one of the most important questions Energy Donkey now needs to answer.
Because "Graham knows a lot about heat pumps" is an excellent reason to listen to Graham.
It isn't, by itself, an architecture for trustworthy AI.
The Other Elephant, Or Donkey, In The Room
Then there is data.
Connect this thing properly and Energy Donkey could potentially know an extraordinary amount about Britain's homes.
Not simply which heat pump somebody owns. It'll know how it operates, when, and it'll track it's efficiency.
It will learn the behaviours.
How owners interact with their heating (I wonder how much swearing it will listen to?).
Which problems cause them to seek help.
And, aggregated across thousands of homes, where heat pumps and their controls repeatedly go wrong. That dataset could become extraordinarily valuable.
Leah says:
"The data is retained by us. We do not sell it on."
And currently:
"The data currently that we have is retained in-house by us and not sold on."
But Energy Donkey's ambitions include manufacturers, wholesalers and large installers, potentially including white-labelled versions of the platform.
Which means governance, security and transparency cannot be an appendix to this project. They are part of the product.
The more useful the Donkey becomes, the more important those questions become.
Because The Ambition Doesn't Stop At Heat Pumps
This, for me, is where Energy Donkey becomes something rather different.
Graham knows heat pumps.
But homes aren't going to contain heat pumps in isolation. They're increasingly going to contain interconnected energy systems.
So what happens when the Donkey learns solar? And batteries? And EV charging?
Leah says that is already on the roadmap.
"We're focusing currently obviously on heat pumps. But the long-term sort of goal and roadmap... is to expand into other areas of the renewable industry."
And crucially, Graham doesn't have to pretend to know everything.
"We'll have Graham for solar, but it won't be Graham, it will be someone else that's an expert, and so on, and so forth."
Eventually:
"Customers can sort of pick and choose what they want Energy Donkey to feed information on."
Now we're somewhere very different.
Imagine a house where the homeowner doesn't particularly care which manufacturer made the heat pump, battery or inverter.
They simply ask:
"I've got £6 of cheap electricity available overnight. It's going to be four degrees tomorrow. The car needs 80% charge by eight and I want the house at 20 degrees when we wake up. Sort it out."
The technology underneath that instruction is hideously complicated.
The human instruction isn't.
That could be the point of Energy Donkey.
Ubiquitous Or Forgotten?
And that's why it's difficult to decide what Energy Donkey is yet.
It could become ubiquitous.
A neutral conversational layer sitting above the increasingly complicated machinery of the electrified home.
Something homeowners barely think about because they simply talk to their house and the software translates what they want into instructions that dozens of pieces of technology understand.
It could make heat pumps easier to own, installers more productive. It could expose badly performing systems. It could reduce pointless call-outs.
It could make commissioning better.
And eventually it could coordinate heating, generation, storage and consumption without requiring homeowners to earn a minor qualification in building-services engineering.
Or it could end up in the dustbin of developmental history alongside thousands of clever pieces of technology that solved a genuine problem but couldn't overcome interoperability, consumer trust, manufacturer resistance, cybersecurity, liability or simply the difficulty of persuading people to pay for another digital service.
It is far too early to know.
Energy Donkey had been live for barely a day when I spoke to Leah. In roughly its first 20 hours, she said it had already received hundreds of interactions and multiple sign-ups.
In the first month, feedback looks good, people are requesting white label versions of Energy Donkey for themselves. But this isn't the Donkey's first rodeo, so to speak.
The Atmo hardware beneath its connected proposition isn't experimental. When I asked how many homes it was already operating in, Leah checked with her boss.
"Approximately 700 homes."
So this isn't Graham running around a field with a donkey and an idea.
There is real engineering underneath the joke. Which may ultimately be the smartest thing about the peculiar name.
It doesn't sound like a solution, a panacea. It sounds like it works hard for you.
What we desperately need is technology that makes all the clever stuff we've already installed feel stupidly simple.
And if a Donkey can do that, perhaps the name isn't quite so daft after all.