Local Queen's students to unveil a green smart phone app in New York

By Ashliegh Gehl

PICTON, On. (06/21/11) Envirolytics founder Patrick Leslie, is taking his team to New York to showcase a smart phone app that will allow home owners to conduct their own home energy audit. Photo by Ashliegh Gehl

Four young men from Picton’s Envirolytics are headed to New York City next week to demonstrate an app that will allow consumers to audit energy usage in the home.

They’re one of five companies internationally selected to showcase a one-of-a-kind technology at IBM’s exclusive SmartCamp event.

Envirolytics founder Patrick Leslie, 23, drummed up the idea while studying mechanical engineering and economics at Queen’s University. The team consists of Queen’s students Kieran Lafferty, 22, Matt Oskamp, 21, and Ang (Draco) Li, 21.

IBM’s SmartCamp is an initiative aimed at exposing entrepreneurial companies like Envirolytics to prospective market investors.

Leslie said the app can analyze everything from lighting to the insulation found in your home. Using GPS, the device can collect weather data. The accelerometer can find the angle of the roof. The camera can be used to find the size of objects in the home.

“So we take all of that information and we send it to our servers. It’ll send back all the different results,” said Leslie. “How much your home was using, how much you could be using and the savings associated with that.”

The smart phone seemed like the perfect tool for consumers to use when trying to figure out how to cut costs.

“It has so many sensors,” said Leslie. “You can walk around your home and really get this information, instead of sitting at a computer in a lab, paying an engineer to do it. To really bring the capabilities of that type of audit to a consumer.”

Leslie says the team is looking to partner with a company so they can give the app away for free.

“We’re bringing something that’s usually professionally administered to the consumer, so we have to augment that with a lot of really intuitive tools and educational content,” said Leslie. “This will really be a good way for people to analyze the best places in their home to save energy, and the best places to make a big environmental impact.”

Envirolytics started in Leslie’s apartment. Much like the product, the company is green – they were incorporated last March.

“There was poor internet. Poor everything,” said Leslie.

When the team won a $150,000 loan from the Prince Edward Lennox & Addington Community Futures Development Corporation and Queen’s University Business Plan Competition last April, they abandoned Leslie ‘s apartment and moved into office space on Picton’s Main St.

“That really gave us the financial starting to be able to start the company,” said Leslie. “From there a lot of professors jumped up and helped us. We’ve built a great board of advisors predominantly out of Queen’s.”

Steven Moore teaches sustainability at Queen’s School of Business. He’s been involved with Envirolytics since its inception.

“This is a story of potential commercial success while doing good,” said Moore. “If we don’t find many similar ways to become more sustainable quickly, large scale human habitation will not continue on this planet beyond 2050.”

The IBM SmartCamp event starts June 28. The team will present their idea to more than 25 world-class industry leaders and investors.