How did you get into coding? Rob Pines: My journey into coding was a bit of an odd one, I wasn’t able to figure out what I wanted to do in life after school and college and ended up getting a degree in Archaeology. But during my studies realised that studying archaeology and spending my time excavating holes in the lovely British weather wasn’t for me. After university, I moved to Leeds with my partner and worked in CEX for a year. Whilst I enjoyed working with the technology and the people, working in retail was my personal idea of hell, and so I began to look for something new. I came acro ..read more

Leeds-based Xerogrid has been named UK technical partner for China-based Pylontech’s UK market, ‘Powercube’ battery systems to provide UK customers with commercial scale energy storage on and off-grid.   Xerogrid supplies off-grid power solutions to commercial and domestic customers across the UK, Spain and Africa.  Xerogrid and Hark, both graduates from the world’s biggest business accelerator programme, Entrepreneurial Spark, met in 2016 and recently collaborated to deploy Hark’s, vendor agnostic cloud-based energy and IoT platform to Pylontech’s Powercube batteries. The technology ..read more

Andrew, our CTO, thinks it’s sweet that I openly tell people that I love my job, but I love my job! Why wouldn’t I tell the world?! #SorryNotSorry Why do I love my job? Well as someone who has previously worked in a not-so-great environment, to work in a company like Hark feels like hitting the jackpot, even a year on I’m still so grateful to feel this happy! This past year I’ve realised how much your contentment with work bleeds into the rest of your life – I’m a happier person all round and I’ve achieved some pretty big personal goals this year too. So what is this blog post about? Well, hav ..read more

There’s more awareness around energy efficiency now than ever before. Individuals and businesses are more conscious of efficient energy use in areas they can control – turning equipment off (or down) outside of operating hours, for example. With real ESG/CSR goals to meet, businesses are searching for ways to further reduce wasted energy and tighten up efficiency across the board. The desire to create a sustainable impact while saving money is a mouth-watering prospect; it almost sounds too good to be true. But this desire has a very real, and surprisingly simple solution – the implementation ..read more

Earlier this week I was looking at buying a new wall clock and in the product description were the words “Good design is as little design as possible. Not burdened with non-essentials.” This, I thought to myself, is one of the ten “Good design” principles introduced by Dieter Rams. Dieter Rams is a designer most associated with the consumer electrics company, Braun and furniture company, Vitsœ. His designs influenced Apple designer Jony Ive, whose dedication to “honesty” and “simplicity” in design pays great homages to Rams’ 10 principles of “Good Design”. Back in the late 1970s, Dieter Rams w ..read more

The way we produce and consume energy these days allows a kind of flexibility between the grid and the consumer that was unheard of in the past. Renewable energy generation, storage batteries and energy management systems (EMS) are critical to today’s energy ecosystem and have some compelling use cases for energy efficiency and sustainability in the commercial and industrial environment. In this article, I’d like to explore some of the ways energy management software can facilitate major cost savings through DUoS avoidance, and open up new revenue streams through demand side response (DSR). Fi ..read more

If you’re not already familiar with hexadecimal numbering or how colours on the web work, you might think that hex codes are mysterious cyphers that can only be understood by computers, but they’re not as cryptic as they appear. I’m going to show you what these codes mean and how to decode them, but first let’s have a quick primer on colour itself. No thanks, take me straight to the good stuff A Primer on Colour The visible light spectrum is the range of wavelengths within the electromagnetic energy spectrum that humans can see. At one end of the visible light spectrum are the shorter waves o ..read more

What is bias and variance? A model with high bias will make strong assumptions about the relationship between the input features and the output, resulting in a simpler model that may not fit the training data well. On the other hand, a model with high variance will make weak assumptions about the relationship between the input features and the output, resulting in a more complex model that will fit the training data well but may not generalise well to unseen data. The ideal model would have a balance of both low bias and low variance, but in practice, it is often a trade-off between the two. W ..read more

Here’s what we’ve got for you this week: Energy firms extend ‘meter reading day’ deadline. Europe’s energy plan: is it enough to get through winter? From Scotland to Sweden: How smart cities are helping residents save energy. The Long-Sought Step-Change In Renewable Energy Battery Tech May Have Arrived. The Sustainable Future of Food Must Bring Everyone to the Table. Energy firms extend ‘meter reading day’ deadline If you use a domestic or commercial energy meter that requires manual readings to be taken, then this is important information for you. Energy companies have told customers they ..read more

Here’s what we’ve got for you this week: Patagonia: Billionaire boss gives fashion firm away to fight climate change. Adobe’s big bet on the future with Figma acquisition. In pictures: Activists take over billboards to call out impact of flying on global carbon emissions. GSK Unveils Sustainability Requirements for Suppliers. Government outlines plans to help cut energy bills for businesses. Patagonia: Billionaire boss gives fashion firm away to fight climate change Photo by CAMPBELL BREWER Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has given away his company to a charitable trust. If you haven’t hear ..read more