Curb Energy Monitoring knows quality connections

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Curb by Elevation in Austin, Texas, is an energy monitoring solution that informs homeowners exactly how and where they’re using energy in their homes. Curb tracks how much power each of their major appliances has used over time, which helps customers identify things accidentally left on or opportunities to save energy and money.

Elevation first tried using inexpensive connectors in their component engineering and realized that they were not reliable. Then, they turned to Phoenix Contact, which is known for producing quality, reliable field-installable connectors. Phoenix Contact sat down with Elevation and discussed their needs to make faster and more reliable connections. Elevation has worked with Phoenix Contact for almost nine years, and they see their sales contacts as partners who provide resources and solutions to support their business.

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Transcript: - My name's Eric Norwood. I'm the CTO, chief technology officer of Elevation.

- My name is Bill Chatterjee. I'm the VP of Operations for Curb, located here in Austin, Texas. So, Curb is an energy monitoring solution that helps tell the homeowner how they're using energy all over their house. But it's not just energy monitoring, it is also looking at the diagnostics and the health of the appliances that it's monitoring. So, one of the things that you go through when you're designing a product is called component engineering. Where you look at every component that you need to build this thing. You pick the biggest things- your processors first, and then you buy all the other components that go around it and you search the market to see who the leading players are.

- My initial perspective was, let's just use inexpensive connectors. Let's get something that's cheap. And what I realized is that price is really not the only variable to evaluate connectors on. And what I found was that Phoenix Contact was a really good partner and a solution provider, rather than a vendor of a particular component. They came into our business, into our office, they got experience with our product, they tested it. They brought us tons of different solutions. They brought experiences from other customers who'd used these different components and educated us about all the other factors that go into selecting the right kind of connector. And ultimately, what we found was that price was not the most important thing, but it was really about finding the right connector that allowed our product to be installed faster and more reliably. And I don't think we would've found that solution, if we went with a different kind of partner for connectors. So, our relationship with Phoenix Contact is really good. I think our local sales person, I don't really view them as a sales person, and they're not a typical pushy sales relationship. Rather, they feel like a partner who's helping understand what's going on in our business, what are the challenges that we're trying to solve, and then empower us with a handful of different solutions that they provide. So, they're here when we need them, they give us all the information we need, and they are really helpful in solving our major problems.

- We have been working with Phoenix Contact and Joni, specifically, for almost nine years now. From the very beginning, Joni has always been extremely supportive and also always been able to find us solutions.

- I really see that relationship continuing to expand as we bring new products to market and we need different solutions and different types of connectors that allow us to lower the cost of our product or speed the installation of our product. So, I really look at Phoenix Contact as a solutions provider that helps us. We bring them in early into the prototype design of our product, because they can help empower us with the right types of materials and types of resources to make that a really, a truly great product.--