The Self-Driving Home: AI, Net-Zero Living and Energy-as-a-Service

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (00:02)
You’ve got a day job and you’ve got a life and things. And most people’s life is not oriented around just reducing the energy bills in their home. So actually our focus is not on that prosumer, it’s on the person that doesn’t understand this stuff and having the AI basically do all of that work for them

Adam Sroka (00:04)
You have to think about it,

Welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. Thank you very much for joining me today. Mark Lufkin from Wondrwall and Wondrwall are a Manchester based home energy company. Could you please introduce yourself, Mark, for the audience and tell us a little bit about what you do.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (01:01)
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. I’m Mark Lufkin, as you said. I’m Chief Product Officer for Wondrwall. Been with the company for pretty much coming on 9 years now, so pretty much since the beginning. My background though is I’m a computer engineer and I’ve spent the last 30 odd years in IT, consumer electronics, companies like HP, Sony, Lenovo. The last one I did was European MD for ViewSonic.

Adam Sroka (01:12)
you

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (01:27)
Sort of my motivation for Wondrwall and being in this was when I started working, I was working over in Germany. We were putting electronics into cars. So anti-lock braking. You didn’t have to wind up your windows anymore. You had a button that pressed it, sat nav and all the rest of it. And if I look back on that now, know, where we came from with cars, wind up windows to a fully electronic computerised car.

We’ve used technology to go and make our cars more comfortable, safer, more efficient. And where we come from, as you said, is a home energy management company. And my personal motivation was, OK, if I compare a home to a car, they’re massively different. We really don’t use technology in homes at all. So Wondrwall really, to a large extent, is about using technology to bring our homes into the 21st century.

And make them more efficient, more comfortable, safer for their occupants.

Adam Sroka (02:22)
Yeah, you can tell that you’re a professional at this Mark. That’s one of the best analogies and intros I think I’ve had. I’ve just sat here thinking I’ve never thought of it like that. That’s great. But yeah, totally. Like I totally get it. Yeah, nice polished intro. I like that. So we’ve done some work in the home energy space and it’s not simple. It’s not simple at all. So I’d love to…

get into, yeah, what was the kind of genesis for Wondrwall? I get that as like your reasoning for doing it. Was that the genesis as well of the company?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (02:51)
Actually, Wondrwall came slightly differently. So when we started up, was actually I can tell you the Wondrwall story while we’re about it as well. It was Dan, who was the very original founder. His grandmother fell over in the house and she spent two days without anybody noticing she’d fallen over. And he had to think about it and said, OK, what could I do?

Adam Sroka (03:13)
⁓

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (03:18)
How could I apply technology to the home to go and address that? And he came up with this idea of putting sensors and electronics into the wallpaper of the home. So you could turn lights on and off, it would monitor the home and so on through these electronics in the wallpaper. Hence the Wondrwall. So the Manchester band connection is not the correct one. So anyway, wallpaper though was…

Adam Sroka (03:36)
Yep.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (03:44)
People didn’t want it. It’s used, but it’s not widely used. So we had to look at okay, how do we go about doing this a little bit differently? And we came up with the idea of using a light switch. But really, the original premises prior to that was two things. One of them was we didn’t like having multiple apps. So it was back at around the time when you had smart lighting.

Adam Sroka (03:45)
Okay.

Thank you.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (04:10)
They had smart heating systems, there were smart burglar alarms, and everyone had a different

app. And we just found that annoying. Everything should be integrated into a single app, into a single platform. So that was the first driver. And number two was ⁓ we wanted to create an intelligent home. So give it a brain, give it a brain and the ability to control itself. And using my car analogy, we modelled ourselves on self-driving cars. So…

Adam Sroka (04:26)
basically that was a powerful effort. And I think that’s why we’re here. it’s a thing that we’re here. And I think that’s we’re still here.

And And I think that’s And I that’s why we’re I think that’s why we’re And think still And think we’re still And I still And I why here. And

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (04:38)
A self-driving car works by having lots of sensors on it. Those sensors gather data which is processed by an artificial intelligence and the AI drives the car. We apply the same principle to a home. So lots of data collected from

that home. That data is processed by our own AI and the AI runs the functions of the home. And it’s that light switch, so that ability to collect the data, that’s the brains behind

the Wondrwall system and we collect what 20,000 data points a day per home, 7 million a year. And that data that feeds into an AI is what makes it tick really and work and do what it has. I think if we look at it, we’ve had some sort of due diligence time and so on from an investment point of view. And we have the most complete data model of a home that’s in existence in the world.

in terms of understanding how that home is used, how it performs, how it’s using energy.

Adam Sroka (05:35)
And so, yeah, so you’re able to produce like a true digital twin of the kind of abstraction of a home and help people with things like retrofits, with optimisation on energy bills, on flexibility, all that kind of stuff. That’s, yeah, that’s really cool.

Yeah, like the AI drives the home. I love that as well. What does like a net zero home mean then in your context? Because it must be quite hard to scale, right? That’s a lot of sensors, there’s a lot of technologies involved there and what’s the scope and like, yeah, what’s the reality of scaling that functionality?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (06:07)
Yeah, well, you’re absolutely right. So like if I was to go and give a goal, a mission statement for the company, it’s that ability to deliver net zero homes at scale. Every home should be net zero. What that would mean technically is that the home generates as much renewable energy itself as it consumes. So that’s net zero energy effectively.

or more, it’s generating more than the home consumes. That is pretty hard to measure and it’s dependent on occupancy patterns and how people use their homes. So what we actually finally settle ourselves on is using SAP, standard assessment procedure for buildings and the zero carbon definition of that. So that’s what’s called an environmental index, which is greater than 100.

Or you can add a prediction of the carbon emissions. So they would be equal or less than zero carbon emissions. And that is our definition. And we basically design the technology to do that. And it goes really in two different ways. One of them is delivering a low carbon heating system based on electricity that’s energy efficient. So you reduce down the amount of energy that you need or certainly the amount of electricity. And then on the flip side,

Adam Sroka (07:14)
you

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (07:32)
you put renewables onto the home, generate energy and then manage that energy together with the consumption to deliver that low carbon home.

Adam Sroka (07:40)
Just out of interest, renewables on the home, are you seeing much other than rooftop solar?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (07:46)
Good question. It’s almost all rooftop solar at the moment, but I remain optimistic for wind. So one of my sort of side projects is looking at interesting technology coming through, which will allow homes to generate renewable energy from wind as well. We’re not there commercially yet, but I have seen certainly a couple of

very promising, well I think have high potential, solutions for wind generation on homes. So I think if you look out 5, 10 years, yes, wind will be a factor. Today, it’s solar though.

Adam Sroka (08:25)
Wow, okay, yeah, because I like years ago saw some really interesting stuff on like vertical turbines and integrated into the building and they looked amazing but not a commercial thing or you see some really gnarly like piezoelectric things that going in around the home that are doing more recapture like energy recapture but I

Yeah, like live in Scotland and all the homes up here, the new homes up here have to have rooftop solar. So it makes a dent actually. It makes a big difference if you get the right stuff on there. I guess, so you’ve got an incredible data set. You’ve got a really good understanding of homes. This net zero carbon piece. I mean, in the research for speaking today, we came across the future home standard.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (08:55)
Yeah.

Adam Sroka (09:08)
Is that like aligned to your thinking or is there a delta there? Do we need to do more? Is that going to help us hit these targets that we’re after?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (09:17)
Well, yeah, now that’s a really good question. So future home standard is, in my mind, a good step forward. So it’s taking us towards where we need to be. It’s making our homes more energy efficient. I should also say it’s not been defined yet, so it’s still under consultation. So what it finally ends up as is

remains to be seen, but I’m hoping it will be announced quite soon. But even so, from what we can see, there are some limitations in the future home standard. The first of them is the homes cost more to build. So we’re designing these new homes, which have got renewable energy in them, but they’re costing more. So if you look at the consultation, the government’s own figures are that

the homes will cost £6,200 more to build than the current new built homes. If you look at like trying to get to zero bills, which is a sort of thing, those homes cost £28,000 pounds more to build. So we’re making very expensive to buy homes when already the house prices are going up and it’s difficult for people to buy homes or becoming ever less accessible and you can’t get the mortgages and so on. So that worries me.

Adam Sroka (10:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (10:32)
The second thing is those homes are not zero carbon. So they may have a bit of renewable on them, but it won’t be enough to get them to a zero carbon position from what we can see. So the homes are reliant on the grid decarbonising to become zero carbon. But the problem with that is these homes have now got electric heating and hot water. They’ve got an EV charger connected to them. So they’re drawing three times as much electricity

as a current new build home. Now, first of all, that energy has got to be generated somewhere, which means more solar farms, more wind farms, maybe nuclear power stations if we’re going to go renewables. But it also means we need to get the energy from where it’s being generated to where it’s being used. And you’re up in Scotland, you’ve got a lot of wind turbines up there. Yeah, yeah, so you’ve got masses of renewable energy generation. Unfortunately, you don’t

Adam Sroka (11:02)
We’ve got loads here, we’ve got loads.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (11:29)
have all the homes. Most of the homes are down where I am, which is London Way. And you’ve got to get the energy from one place to the other. And that’s a problem because the grid is constrained at the moment. We just can’t get the energy through. But the final one, the one that really drove us, was these homes cost more to run. The energy bills go up. And the issue there is electricity just costs 4 times more than gas.

Adam Sroka (11:31)
and, and.

you

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (11:55)
So even if you’re building a very efficient home, it’s hard to get 4 times the efficiency of that gas heated home. So what we’re ending up with is we’ve got a home which is more expensive to build, as I’ve said, so £6,200 and it’s not saving ⁓ money on the bills. Actually, the figure the government came up with is it would save £120 versus the current new build homes

in that standard. So what you’ve got is a house which is costing more, which is barely changing your energy bills, which makes people worse off. And that was really the driver from our point of view is how do we take future home standard to where it should be, exceed the future home standard and allow people to build homes which don’t cost more to build than they do today, but they also reduce the energy bills. And that’s really been what’s driving us and

finally get that technology rolled out to deliver these zero carbon homes at scale.

Adam Sroka (12:57)
I mean, wow, a million questions. Yeah, okay. I’m interested to hear from the homes that you have and the datasets that you’ve got. Are you seeing any real prosumer, like domestic properties? Is that happening?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (12:59)
Go for it.

Yes, it is. So I would say a lot of the early adoption was prosumer type adoption, people that wanted to take care of themselves. But given what we do, actually our preferred customer is somebody that doesn’t understand this. The prosumer is able to take some benefit, but there’s not many of them. And it’s really hard to have the time to do this. You know, I would class myself as that prosumer person as well.

Adam Sroka (13:28)
Okay.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (13:39)
but it’s hard to spend all the time. You’ve got a day job and you’ve got a life and things. And most people’s life is not oriented around just reducing the energy bills in their home. So actually our focus is not on that prosumer, it’s on the person that doesn’t understand this stuff and having the AI basically do all of that work for them such that they can get the benefits

Adam Sroka (13:43)
You have to think about it,

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (14:07)
without having to understand what the system’s doing, what all the requirements are.

You know you look at the wholesale market for electricity, you have 48 different prices for electricity every day for import and the same thing for export. And somehow you’ve got to manage when you use your appliances and your heating and your hot water and your EV charger to get the lowest possible price.

Those 48 prices change every single day depending on how much sun is shining, how much wind is blowing and so on. That’s really hard to do. So that’s really hard to do for a normal person or even for a prosumer person. For the AI, it’s actually dead easy.

Adam Sroka (14:52)
And that’s it. 100%. We do a lot in that space. It’s kind of my background was in more grid scale battery assets, but how do you trade those 48 prices over 13 potential markets? And it becomes intractable very, very quickly for professional traders, let alone someone at home. Are you looking at things like virtual power plant technology and bundling these up?

And trading, like aggregating up the homes under your control? Or are you more focused on driving down the individual specific user’s costs? Because they are actually, they’re slightly aligned, but they’re not exactly aligned. Those as goals, I find like the good of the BMU isn’t the same as the good of the individual home exactly.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (15:35)
Yeah, no, that again, really good question. So most of our focus at the moment is on an individual home and reducing the energy bills. So the process is relatively simple. When the sun shines, what you’re trying to do is run the home from the free solar generation. You’re charging up the battery, you’re heating the water. So effectively that home runs for free during the summer months when you’ve got sunshine.

On the flip side in winter, you’ve got shorter days.

Adam Sroka (16:05)
.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (16:05)
Generally speaking, the sun’s not shining so much, the weather’s worse, and it’s a lot colder, so you’ve got your heating on. So your energy consumption is higher and your energy generation is lower. So it’s very rare that the solar will exceed what the home is consuming. So in this case, the system is estimating energy consumption based on historical patterns and a little bit of the weather.

It’s also predicting the solar generation based on the weather forecast, works out what the difference is and buys that energy in at the cheapest possible time to charge the battery, heat the water, charge your EV, to heat the home in fact as well. So we’re using cheap energy when there’s insufficient solar. And then finally, it’s also designed to push energy back to the grid when

the prices are high. So the flip side of off peak energy is peak energy. So if you can buy cheap energy at a lower price, then you can sell your electricity back to the grid at peak times. Actually, it makes sense to import cheap and sell high. And the system is designed to go and do that. You add all of that together. So free in summer, cheap in winter, sell high

in summer again to offset against what you import in winter, and you end up with really low energy bills. So you can actually get to a zero or a negative bill if you’re exporting enough energy back to the grid. That’s kind of where we are at the moment. But as you said, there is a step for we’re doing what we would call day ahead trading at the moment. So we’re looking at the prices a day ahead. But those prices change on the same day basis. So there’s opportunity there.

Adam Sroka (17:31)
Not bad.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (17:53)
There’s capacity markets, there’s aggregating all those homes together and using the batteries and the flexibility on the heating, the EV charging and the hot water, which you can use as well, which gives you more money. And yeah, you’re right, the two do not exactly overlap. But I suppose the best way of thinking about it is ultimately it gives you a bigger cake and then it depends on how you top it up.

Adam Sroka (18:14)
you

Yeah.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (18:20)
And our thought on it is if we can go and do that, then actually we can pass some of that through to consumers to help them to reduce their bills further and get to an even better position. That’s definitely, yeah, it’s something we’re actively working on and delivering right at the moment.

Adam Sroka (18:40)
Amazing. Okay. I mean, no mean feat having built a few of them. They’re not the easiest of things in the industrial grid scale space. And we work with an organisation that were investigating doing this at the domestic level. And yeah, you get into the weeds of occupancy models and…

like the difference between a grid scale battery is it doesn’t need to go to the hospital in the middle of the night and it doesn’t have like holidays and things, whereas the home case gets really messy really quickly actually.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (19:10)
But that’s a really good point you make. But that’s actually one of the key advantages for Wondrwall. Given we know how people are using their homes when they’re there, which rooms they’re in at different times of the day, when they’re using heating, when they’re using hot water, when they’re charging their EVs, we have so much data that actually we can align that

Adam Sroka (19:10)
Okay.

Hmm.

you

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (19:32)
energy consumption model and what we’re doing with the flexibility to the way the users are using their homes such that they don’t even notice that it’s happening.

Adam Sroka (19:42)
But even for us energy nerds, this is hard. Like it’s really very complicated. I mean, people don’t realise even that you must have some horror stories about

metering data access, integrating with hardware systems like heat pump manufacturers, all this stuff. Like it’s not a straightforward piece of tech to go away and build. So what’s the Wondrwall experience? If I’m listening to this and thinking, right, I’m signing up. You send me a load of sensors through the post, I pop them in the rooms and then it’s just all done for me. Talk me through the kind of journey, I guess.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (20:14)
Yeah. So we mostly actually sell to new build, which simplifies the process. So if you think of it from a new build home, you’re buying a new home from a house builder or you’re moving into it from a housing association or RP. So they’ve built that house. It’s got all your Wondrwall tech in it. So from that perspective, we go through the process of doing the design, of doing the SAT calcs

Adam Sroka (20:18)
Okay.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (20:41)
together with the developer to get that house ready to go. We can also predict energy bills, we can predict energy consumption and so on, and we get that home ready to go. And when we first started out, it’s not really a horror story, but we’d assumed that this would be as easy to use as…

Adam Sroka (20:41)
Hmm.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (21:05)
the famous Amazon speakers whose name I can’t mention otherwise it’ll start talking to me. But we assumed it would be as easy as installing an Echo speaker into your home and we could just let people go and do it. The first thing we found was that was not the case. People wanted to be handheld through that process. We ended up going and doing it ourselves. So instead of getting calls on a Friday evening or over the weekend and people

Adam Sroka (21:05)
Yes, set it off.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (21:35)
saying, how do I do this? How do I do that? We just went in and did it all for them. So when they move in, it’s ready to go. It all works. The second thing we found was people struggle with understanding it. So as technology people, technology nerds, we thought this was dead easy to understand. It was really, really easy. It turns out that actually 99% of the population doesn’t actually find this as easy at all. So what we do is an onboarding. So for every customer,

Adam Sroka (21:54)
Yeah. ⁓

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (22:05)
every homeowner, every occupant that moves into our home. We do an onboarding where one of our engineers goes out, talks them through it, demos it, walks them through the process, gets them to understand it, helps them, and then we have an ongoing technical support. And I’m actually quite proud of the fact, if you look at TrustPilot, we’ve got like a 4.9 rating on TrustPilot and the feedback is excellent, which for me is absolutely critical as we’re trying to roll out these smart systems. We have to

Adam Sroka (22:20)
you

All right.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (22:34)
give people confidence that they work. And a lot of that is, even though it’s technology, is personal. It’s about making people feel comfortable with it. And so the people to people connection and helping them to understand this tech is a critical part of it, which is very analogue in a digital world. But I kind of like to think that tech’s not taking over everything from us, that we will still have those personal connections.

Adam Sroka (22:58)
⁓

Hey, so if you read even a smidgen of the stuff I write online, like, I basically have one message and it’s that actually the tech bit is almost the easy bit it’s the human stuff that’s really, really hard. And especially in the domestic case, when we’ve done that kind of work, like, there’s a there’s a psychological barrier to people handing over control of their home to anything like any small like even Hive, think there was a story about Hive

ended up putting a dial on one of their devices that didn’t do anything because it made people feel like they had an element of control over the system because actually it’s just, it’s my home and I want to, even though the algorithm says this is optimal, I want the heating up or I want this and so on and so forth. Yeah, that human part is really interesting. I guess to switch a little bit into the tech. what kind of platforms are you using? Like what kind of…

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (23:44)
And.

Adam Sroka (23:52)
tools, forecasts, things like that.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (23:54)
So the hardware, the light switches are all our own. They’re based on a Zigbee mesh network, although they’ve got Wi-Fi built into them to connect back to the home. It’s all built on an AWS platform. We use pretty much everything they have, so IoT frameworks. We’re using the Amazon forecast stuff at the moment for some of the AI machine learning prediction.

Adam Sroka (24:01)
Thank

Yeah

Okay.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (24:20)
That’s all being switched

over right at the moment to SageMaker because Forecast is going away and SageMaker is just better. So we’re right in the process of redoing the AI piece and improving it. We’ve also got the voice framework built in. So actually every one of our light switches is an Amazon Echo device and you can talk to your home. And weirdly enough when we do customer surveys, this is one of the things that they love. Like

Adam Sroka (24:38)
Okay.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (24:44)
And it’s generally the kids walking around the house going, off the toilet light. You know, when I was a kid, you used to go and switch off the light and put people in the dark. These days, you can just say it or do it from an app.

Adam Sroka (24:49)
Thanks.

You have to stand up to turn the TV on.

Do remember that? You have to stand up and press the button on the TV to get it to come on.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (24:59)
That’s absolutely right. Yeah, no, it’s that. There was actually one, well, I found a piece of feedback from one of the customers. It was actually an HA customer and they fed back that the energy savings was great. But what they really loved about it was it was a tech home and that their kid growing up in this home was getting exposure to the

Adam Sroka (25:04)
you

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (25:25)
the sort of technology that was going to become standard in homes in the future. And they saw that as helping to develop them and make them a better person and better ready for future life. And it wasn’t just about the energy savings, but it was about how it kept them comfortable, how it kept them safe, how it was, they could learn from the technology and see where the future of this stuff was going and get a step ahead of everybody else. They actually called it game changing.

I just love that. We talk a lot about energy and the bills, but it’s actually a lot more than that.

Adam Sroka (25:55)
Awesome, amazing.

Yeah, I guess it’s like a really nice, in your face example of like STEM in action for young children to see because it’s a thing that anyone outside of a STEM career can explain. Well there’s technology in the light switch that does this and it’s all really clever. And if you want to work on this kind of stuff, it shows more than a lot of things that it’s right there and it’s something that everyone could quite like grok quite quickly. You know, I really like that. Yeah. I saw on the SageMaker piece, I saw a

like an extended tech demo of it, at a partner invite thing at AWS recently. It’s amazing. The stuff that’s coming down the pipe with that as well. It’s a really exciting journey ahead for the SageMaker platform. So I’m not surprised that you’re kind of migrating over to that.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (26:42)
Yeah.

Well, it’s being applied in a few ways. One of them is obviously the energy management. But actually, we think we can improve our tech support and how the system works. So through the data we have, what we already know today is 97% of our calls are resolved remotely without ever having to go and visit the home to go and fix something. Because when

the occupant calls up and says, I’ve got a problem. I don’t feel warm or whatever they say. We go into the data back end, we have a look at how that home is performing, what it’s doing, what’s happening. And we can often fix the problem without ever having to do it. So the thought we had was, okay, actually, we don’t want the user to be calling us up. We already have that data. So let’s look for patterns that are causing issues.

Where there may be a problem, analyse that data in the same way as the engineer does it, and then try and fix it automatically if we can. If we can’t fix it automatically, talk to the user and talk them through the process of what they need to do. And then only if needed do we bring in the engineer to fix the really biggest problems where we do need to go online. And we think we can really change the way that

people use their homes because they’ll never even see the problems in the first place. Those problems will be fixed before they even realise that there’s been a problem. But it will also help us with stuff like if you look at, social housing, people are often concerned about the energy bills. So they don’t turn their heating on in winter or they’ll dry their clothes in a particular room and they won’t open the windows and they won’t have it properly ventilated so you’ve got

Adam Sroka (28:20)
Yeah.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (28:32)
damp and mould issues. We have all that data. So again, the system can automatically monitor for all of that. And if it sees issues, it can raise a notification and somebody can intervene. We can reach out and say, are you having problems paying your bills? We’ve seen that it’s a bit damp. What’s the issue? Have you looked to open your windows? Is there a problem with ventilation? Can we do something to help? And it’s that proactive approach to helping people through the tech

Adam Sroka (28:42)
I’m basically.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (29:01)
rather than being reactive

and waiting for people to get the problem in the first place.

Adam Sroka (29:05)
Yeah, we did a desk study for an organisation that had a load of this data. It was a social housing organisation where we found that you could do really clever stuff like predict when someone might be pushed into fuel poverty. You can look at abandonment and the likelihood of abandonment because the usage patterns change a certain way. You can detect when like a window is broken or something because there’s like huge shifts in the data. And I guess for where you sit, like

Actually, the more data, the more homes you get, you start to see the more like once in a million events that any one homeowner is never likely to see, that everyone wants to be aware of. And you can build those safety nets in for people. No I really, yeah, I can really kind of see, it must be an exciting place to work. You must have a lot of really clever AI data boffins in the team.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (29:58)
They’re definitely a lot cleverer than I am. I’m old school computer engineer. It was over 30 years ago that I did my studying and things have changed an awful lot in the meantime, but yeah, we’ve got a lot of very clever people working for us. And it is, as you say, it’s a fun place. It’s probably my favourite job pretty much that I’ve ever had. This is brilliant. It feels like you’re doing something really good, but really exciting at the same time.

I’m not just trying to make a profit anymore, I’m actually doing some good for the world.

Adam Sroka (30:26)
Amazing, what a mix. Yeah.

Yeah. And just on the AI bit, I guess, are you seeing use cases for large language models, generative AI, is there a draw from customers or, everyone’s trying to force feed it onto their product, right? But is it right? Is there, is there an exciting future for that at Wondrwall?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (30:50)
There’s definitely an exciting future. It’s really one of our major focus areas is to improve the AI. So the company was built on the idea of an intelligent home. So it’s right back at the beginning. And we think this can make it better. Where I do think it’s a little different, it was actually your example where you were talking about how people interact with the system and so on and the dial that doesn’t move. We actually approach it slightly differently.

One of the issues we had originally was the AI does stuff and people don’t even see it. So they don’t actually see a value in it. But on the flip side, they also want to have that control over the home or at least a feeling of control over the home. So what we’ve actually started doing is making the AI interact with the user. So a really simple case, let’s say you leave home and you haven’t turned your burglar alarm on.

Or you haven’t switched off the lights, what the Wondrwall system will do is it will detect that you’ve left home. You’re not there. It’ll see that the lights are on or that the burglar alarm’s not been turned on. But instead of just turning it on for you, it sends a notification through that says, we think you’ve left home. You haven’t turned on your burglar alarm. Would you like me to do this for you? It’s giving the user that

Adam Sroka (32:10)
Thank

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (32:15)
feeling of control. So they’re now in control of their home. It’s not this entity taking over everything from them. But it’s also demonstrating

Adam Sroka (32:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (32:24)
that there is an entity, there is an intelligence happening in the home that’s adding value to their lives. So it’s making it easier. You know, you’ve got busy life, you run out, I ran out the door one day with my kids taking them to school, and I forgot to lock the door. Actually, I left the door open. You know, the

kids haven’t got their bags, haven’t got their water bottles, haven’t got their lunches. And I was just that flustered that I forgot it. And my wife would probably say something else, but anyway. I think it’s nice to have the technology that helps you with that. So it’s looking after you, looking what’s happening and recognising some of those issues and then helping you in your busy life.

Adam Sroka (32:42)
Mm-hmm.

No, I, yeah, I think it’s really cool. And even changing the kind of default interface to technology, like everyone has an app, everyone loves an app, but actually that chat to the home chat to the notification, that kind of, that kind of environment, explain what happened. Like, why did this happen? Why did this change? Like that is a really scalable use case for these things. I think, yeah, it could be quite interesting. guess,

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (33:27)
Yeah, well, I think it changes everything. It makes it much more usable

and appealing to the consumer, the user of the system.

Adam Sroka (33:36)
I guess what’s the plan for the next five years then? What changes are you driving? What new projects are in the pipeline that you can share?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (33:45)
Yeah, well, the really big one for us actually was about addressing the cost of building the homes or doing this stuff in the first place. we’ve done a load of these homes. We’ve been doing it for about 5, 6 years now, and we can demonstrate it reduces the build. And everyone says, yeah, this is absolutely fantastic. But what we were finding is the people that were using it that were people that wanted eco homes in the first place. They were

selling their homes or they were selling the benefits on the basis of the sustainability. Or it was social housing because they don’t care about profits, they just want to do the right thing for their tenants. But what we found was most people weren’t willing to put the technology in, you know, putting the solar, EV, battery, it’s kind of expensive, it adds another £10-15k to the cost of the home. And

as I said, you know, it doesn’t always pay itself back. You have £15k and you’re saving X amount or not saving even any bills on it and well not enough and is it really worth it? So the idea we came up with, which sounds really simple, but was a lot more difficult to go and actually implement was we give the kit away for free. So we supply and install the solar,

Adam Sroka (34:43)
Yeah.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (35:03)
the battery, the inverter, the EV charger for free. We then sell the energy, the solar energy generated from those panels back to the consumer, the homeowner at a reduced price. it’s taken, you say you worked in commercial space, so PPAs, Power Purchase Agreements are fairly widespread in commercial. We just applied the same thing to a residential. So instead of buying energy from the grid at 27p per kilowatt hour,

Adam Sroka (35:04)
Wow.

Yep.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (35:31)
or 25 point something from July, you’re buying it at 15p from us. So what you’ve got is a zero carbon house that costs the same as a gas heat at home today, but is reducing your energy bills because you’re getting cheaper electricity from the solar. And there’s no ongoing costs. One of the things that keeps on getting forgotten with a lot of this technology is it doesn’t last forever. A battery life just like on a mobile phone.

Adam Sroka (35:49)
you

Mm-hmm.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (36:01)
That home battery will degrade over time and will need replacing after 10 years. And there’s a cost associated with that as well. So actually that cost is built in because we’re an energy supplier. We take care of making sure that energy supply is reliable and always delivering what we say it will. So we’re replacing, upgrading the kit in the home on a regular basis as well within that cost.

Adam Sroka (36:10)
Mm.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (36:27)
And the net effect is actually when we run the calculations and you look at the cost of putting it into the house, the mortgage payments you’ll have and so on, it ends up being cheaper to use this model, what we call Power Plan, than it does to go and buy the kit outright in the home and maintain it yourself. And that’s really the focus. How do we, yeah.

Adam Sroka (36:46)
That’s really cool.

And that is again, like I’m aware that that requires not only have you got to have the tech, the AI, all the models, but there’s actually a huge burden of the financial instruments to be able to make that a possibility and be able to leverage enough credit or whatever or cash if you’ve got it, to have a stock of assets that you’ve paid for that are out there being used, but slowly recouping the cost of

long before you make a profit on it and so on and so forth. But yeah, you’re driving real adoption and kind of removing every barrier. So no, I think that’s amazing. Really cool to hear. And I wish you all the success with it. That’s blinding. Okay, well, look, this has been an amazing conversation. Look, I’m dead excited to hear about Wondrwall and what you’re up to over the next few years. I’d love to get under the hood into some of the tech and speak to some your AI boffins.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (37:26)
Thank you.

Adam Sroka (37:40)
Before we let anyone go, I always like to ask if there’s anything you would like to promote or plug or there’s things you want to share, where’s the best place for us to point the audience?

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (37:52)
Well, the easiest is our website, course, wondrwall.com So like the song, no E, we had to differentiate somehow. wondrwall.com Or actually, I love talking about this stuff. I hope it comes across. I’m on LinkedIn. I love people connecting. I post stuff on there fairly regularly. So if you want to follow or connect with me,

Adam Sroka (37:59)
you

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (38:20)
absolutely open to any of your people sort of reaching out and connecting and DMing me and having conversations. I love this stuff and it’s always good to go and engage with other people on the different perspectives and different ideas and just to talk about it.

Adam Sroka (38:38)
Amazing. Well, look, I really appreciate you coming on today, Mark, and wish you the best of luck. Thanks very much.

Mark Lufkin (Wondrwall) (38:43)
Thank you for your time as well. It’s good to talk to you Adam.

Ciara Inglis (38:49)
Just wrapped up with Mark Lufkin from Wondrwall there. Just such an interesting business going from IoT devices and monitoring stuff within the home to full on domestic micro grid, virtual power plants, optimisation. We had a really good chat about how you balance the needs of the user with the needs of the grid, how you make revenue. Some of the really clever stuff they’re doing around not just the technology products, but the financial products

that enable them to really empower and enable their users to do a lot more with the assets and the energy that they have. Great episode, really good chat. Always fun to talk about domestic energy use cases.