Hi All,
My name is Kyle, I've been a host for about 2 years at my lovely house in the Blue Mountains. During that time I have had a great (mostly) experience with Airbnb guests but I've had a bunch of issues to deal with in relation to my electricity costs and guests leaving the AC and other things on when they check out. To solve this I ended up building a soloution for my house that syncs with my Airbnb calendar with a device I built that automatically turns certain things on and off based on when guests are checking in and checking out. For example, my house is typically only booked on weekends and largely vacant during the week. I have hooked my system up to my hot water system so it only turns on in preparation for a guests arrival, stays on as normal whilst they are there and then turns off automatically once they have checked out, saving me heaps in electricity cost. I have it hooked up to AC, my floor heating and my hot water service. It's designed to only shut down only those items you dont need running whilst the property is empty leaving the fridge, modem, security system, lights, power points all running as normal.
Because this worked so well I decided to leave my high paying corporate job and try and turn this solution into a business. We have spent six months developing and testing the product, gaining the appropriate approvals and building a host friendly interface. Our next step is to conduct a pilot program with a few hundred hosts around our home base in Sydney to get an idea of what hosts think, what works well, what can be improved and to collect the data to determine how much we can save people (I save about 40% of my total electricity cost).
We are looking to be ready to instal in August 2017. We are prepared to supply, instal and set up the system at our cost for the first 50 pilot customers.
We have a few simple prequalifiers for the trial,
- Your Airbnb property must have it's own electricity meter.
- Your Airbnb propoerty must be within 3hrs drive from Sydney CBD,
- Your whole Airbnb property must be deiciated to short term accommodation rental (on multiple platforms in fine). We don't think this works as well if you are just renting out a room.
- Your Airbnb property must have an occupancy rate of less than 70%. i.e it's empty at least 2 days a week.
If you are interested please let me know and I would be happy to share further information with you on the system and the pilot program.
Kind Regards
Kyle
