About

Clime aggregates data from indoor air quality (IAQ) sensors, thermostats, water heaters, and other “smart” IoT home appliances to compute a green home score. Home owners, insurers, underwriters, contractors and utilities use this score to track air quality, report insulation effectiveness, score leads, and ensure compliance.

<aside> 😎 Clime seeks to become the gold standard for the fast, inexpensive measurement of home energy efficiency that is explicitly separate from occupant behavior.

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Team

Clime is co-founded by two entrepreneurs with complimentary backgrounds.

Howard Chong, Ph.D.

Howard Chong received a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught microeconomics, environmental economics, and sustainability as an assistant professor at Cornell University, where he was a faculty fellow at Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. His past research includes studies of energy use in buildings of different ages, the impact of carbon markets on firms, and water markets.

Ryan Buckley, MBA

Ryan Buckley received an MBA from MIT Sloan and an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School. He has co-founded, run, and sold several sales and marketing technology companies. Most recently, he was hired as CEO of MightySignal, a leading mobile data company, which he sold in 2021. He also teaches business, marketing, and sales at Diablo Valley College.

Our Approach

Clime is a consumer product with enterprise applications. The green home scoring calculation is written, reviewed and tested in central New York and California. It currently uses only the temperature reading to calculate the leakiness of the home’s building envelope. The additional particle and gas readings will refine the score further.

Data Collection

Our approach relies fundamentally on our ability to collect household temperature and IAQ data. We can collect it through partnerships with existing IAQ products or we can build our own custom IAQ sensor.

IAQ Data

There are several existing IAQ products available for purchase.

Each product has an API that we can use to integrate into our dashboard and calculate our green home score.

In the future, if it proves too difficult to partner with existing products, we may decide to build our own IAQ product. Sensors are available off-the-shelf and can be integrated into Arduino architecture. We will need to design custom control boards in order to reduce the size of the device. This approach is feasible but we would much prefer to focus on aggregating data and building software to analyze it.

Thermostat Data

Each of the major thermostat companies have APIs that we can leverage to collect household HVAC data. Users can authenticate through their thermostat accounts to authorize Clime to access their data. As more thermostats come online, we’ll include them as well.