As the internet of things hits the home, I’m often wondering what innovation could produce actual energy savings beyond the low hanging fruit of the thermostat which is already getting competitive with everyone from Honeywell to Nest marketing connected products. The HVAC unit is the biggest power draw in most American homes. Other potential energy centers that I believe could become opportunities, particularly as time of use pricing gets rolled out, are the pool pump and the washing machine.

But beyond just the thermostat, Keen has an interesting solution to the problem of homes where different temperature settings are optimal for different parts of the house. The company has a Zigbee connected $60 air vent that opens and closes to direct hot or cold air to where it’s needed. Initially it’ll just track how you program it in order to make adjustments. But clearly some sort of motion detection sensor combined with analytics would be ideal for getting the vents to constantly shift around your behavior. Throw in a temperature sensor and now we’re really cooking. Or even better have all these sensors in the vent sending data back to a centralized thermostat to make both the vent and thermostat decision making even better.

Finding connected things in the home that produce a real energy ROI or improve convenience is a challenge. So far, what we’ve seen is that you have to go after the low hanging fruit–home heating and cooling. But with such a big problem to tackle it’s not surprising that we could see incremental improvements like connected air vents.