CES 2025: TEWKE Intelligent Light Switch

Allison interviews TEWKE’s Dreamer, Piers Daniell, about their intelligent smart switch called Tap that helps automatically control energy consumption in the home. TEWKE’s goal is to save the homeowner money, reduce energy demands on the grid, and support a smart grid if available.

Tap consists of a small, high-resolution OLED touchscreen measuring 3 inches by 3 inches. To install Tap, you replace your wall switch with a hard-wired dock and simply snap the Tap screen into the dock. The fact that Tap does not require a neutral wire in the light switch to operate makes it compatible with every light switch in your home.

Once installed, Tap automatically meshes with other Tap switches installed in your home using Thread technology. Since it is Matter-compatible, Tap also communicates with other Matter-compatible devices in your home and can be configured to control them as well.

Tap contains nine sensors that allow it to monitor all aspects of home energy and health conditions. So in addition to readings such as temperature, humidity, and energy consumption, it can also tell you about your home’s air quality.

Using this data, Tap monitors and manages your home’s energy consumption to minimize energy costs. This becomes particularly important if your energy costs are based on time of use. Using an AI engine, Tap will learn your energy consumption routines and can recommend and automatically shift energy usage to times when costs are lower.

Learn more at https://tewke.com/

Using a Screen Reader? click here

Transcript of Interview:

Allison: Well as long as you put the buzzword of AI into a press release I’m gonna show up. So I’m here at the TEWKE booth with Piers Daniell and he’s gonna tell us about their smart switch. I’m sorry smart… Intelligent smart switch.

Piers: Intelligent smart switch. No dumb one. Exactly. So we’re from London. We spent the last few years developing what we believe is the next generation of light switch. And the reason we’re building it is because we want to build a smart grid. And the best way of doing a smart grid is to control energy within the home.

Piers: So what we do is we replace any light switch. So in America, Europe and it becomes an intelligent sort of control for Lutron style home automation platform. And meanwhile in the background so you’ve got really cool you’ve got lots of sensors so we’ve crammed our light switch full of nine sensors and what it gives us is a really good insight as to how you live in your home and what you’re doing.

Piers: So automation is super simple. You know five-year-old and 95-year-old can use it without instruction. But in behind the scenes we’re using all this data to understand you know is your humidity right? Do you need to open a window? Have you got molds? All the elements that actually become part of how do you create an efficient safe home.

Allison: So where is it getting the data that it’s displaying?

Piers: So we’ve got all that in the light switch itself.

Allison: Oh the humidity and the air quality?

Piers: So everything is in this device here so I can just take this off. So everything is built in. So we manufacture this in London. And the idea is that when we come to the US we will manufacture in the US as well.

Allison: So what he’s got in his hand, some people are only listening, is what maybe three, three and a half inches across square.

Piers: It’s like we talk about it being half an iPhone.

Allison: There you go.

Piers: Maybe a big iPhone.

Piers: So it’s just an OLED screen. Very bright. It’s gorgeous.

Piers: We can’t call it a tablet. Because in Europe they’ll make us put a USB port into it.

Allison: That’s right.

Piers: If it’s called a tablet.

Piers: It’s not a tablet. So as you can see it’s telling us we have to put it back onto the dock. So we replace the light switch with something called a wall dock. And it still has physical buttons on it so you can still switch the lights on and off. So you don’t need to worry about technology taking over your life. And then you put the wall dock, the panel back onto the wall dock. And then it just connects up. It meshes with the other light switches in the house using a technology called Thread.

Allison: Oh yeah.

Piers: And then we’re matter compatible so that we can then talk to other devices within your home. And then what we do is we, in the background, we look at how your energy consumption is. So in the UK we’re talking to your smart meter. We’re talking to your plugs. So smart plugs. And we’re then starting to optimize your energy consumption.

Piers: So like my mother used to nag me to turn the lights off or turn the temperature down. We’re doing all of that continuously in the background. And in London we’re saving about 50% of the energy cost just by installing our light switches. So that’s not installing insulation. That’s not installing solar, heat pumps, batteries. Just by putting our light switches in, we’re saving half the cost of the energy consumption in the home. About 30% of the actual consumption is being saved. And so for us…

Allison: I’m going to challenge you a little bit. The lights today, since they’re LEDs and…

Piers: They don’t save you very much at all.

Allison: Right. I don’t see how you do 30%.

Piers: Lots of little micro savings. And then obviously we talk to thermostats so we can control those. And we talk to white goods.

Allison: I flick on my electric oven and all that savings gone.

Piers: It has, but also in the UK for example, which I think is coming to the US, is time of day tariffs.

Allison: Yeah, we have that.

Piers: Okay. Well, not all states do yet. But in the UK we’ve got it down to 30 minutes. So every 30 minutes the tariff changes. But you know, as a consumer, I can understand that because I’m a geek. My wife, my children don’t give a shit about that sort of thing. Sorry, apologies for profanity. They don’t care about those sorts of things.

Piers: So what you need is a device that’s automatically managing that. So the feedback we give to the user is wait 20 minutes, you’ll save $2. And what we’re trying to do is nudge people in the same way you’re nudged into doing recycling. We try and nudge you into actually changing your behavior. And by changing your behavior, 60% of all consumption in the home is user driven.

Allison: Okay. So if I’m deciding when to run the dishwasher, for example, I tried to turn it on at 8:40, it’s going to go, man, if you just waited till nine, that would cost you this much less.

Piers: Exactly. And what we’re doing in London is we’re talking to the smart socket behind your dishwasher. So when it actually turns on, we turn it off. And most washing machines remember their status. So the moment the power gets turned back on again, they continue their cycle. So we’re turning unsmart devices smart.

Allison: So it sounds like we have to have a lot of outlets put into the house to have this work.

Piers: And that’s our next product is actually the plug socket. So really smart, very nice plug socket, LED ring in it. It glows different colors depending on energy consumption, help train you again. So that, you know, for us, the ecosystem is light switch and plug socket. That’s our control. Everything else we just talk to using an API or MATA.

Allison: I’ll tell you what else would be great is if you had, say, your TV and your DVD player, or your Apple TV plugged into an outlet that was smart, that knew that you don’t watch TV in the middle of the night, and it turned off all those little LEDs, right?

Piers: Exactly. So we’ve got about a million of them just in our bedroom. So we reckon 10% of all energy in the home is just passive power.

Allison: Right.

Piers: Right. So it’s just, you know, we saw a PlayStation 3 consumes 22 watts of energy off.

Allison: Are you serious?

Piers: Oh, man.

Piers: So just 22 watts all the time, just being off, not being used. And that’s where the AI bit comes in because we use something called neuro-symbolic AI, where we’re…

Allison: Say that again. That’s a fun word.

Piers: Neuro-symbolic.

Allison: Oh, sure.

Piers: So it’s basically we teach the AI engine some basic rules, but 90% of its learning comes from the user in the home. And it’s about your home, not about my home. So we’re not interested in big data. So it’s the opposite model of AI. What we’re interested in is your individual behavior processed locally on the switch, understands your behavior, and by your interaction with the switch, you teach the AI engine.

Piers: So if we do something and you don’t like it and you switch it back, we learn that. And then the next part is about giving you really language, natural language communication. So, you know, turn it open a window, you know, turn the heating down, you know, turn off this, turn on that. And that, you know, you’ll save $2, you’ll save $5. And that becomes part of then you learn it.

Allison: It seems like that’s sort of gamifying it too, right?

Piers: Exactly. Yeah. And I think, you know, that’s why it’s all like lots of pretty colors. But in a way that’s classy.

Allison: Yeah.

Piers: We’re bringing a bit of class to this. So we don’t, we want it to be a sexy product that, you know, if you got it under the Christmas tree, you would be happy. Not upset that your partners bought you a light switch.

Allison: There you go.

Piers: Sort of like, think of it as Nest 2.0.

Allison: Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly what it sounded like.

Piers: I think Nest would have done the light switch had they not got bought by Google. And I think this is, this is the hardest part. And the really hard part for light switches is that a lot of light switches don’t have a neutral wire. So what it means is the lights are in series so that when the light switch is off, there’s no power going through the circuit.

Piers: So no company has really been able to put technology in a light switch without that neutral wire. You don’t know if you haven’t got one until you take your light switch off the wall. And what we’ve done is developed the tech and patented it that allows us to put any technology, our technology straight into any light switch.

Allison: Whether it’s got a neutral wire or not.

Piers: Exactly. So the really unique bit of our proposition is we don’t need a neutral wire. And that will unlock the whole marketplace. Whereas, you know, we might have only five or 10% of users currently using smart home and certainly automated lighting. We can penetrate 100%.

Allison: That’s fascinating. So how this is powered from the light switch itself?

Piers: Yeah. So everything…

Allison: Because you didn’t put a USB-C port in it.

Piers: No, exactly. So yeah, the power comes from the light switch. We use a combination of parasitic power and a battery within our device to basically manage the lighting. But to do that effectively, we’ve had to make it a really hardcore, low energy supply to the switch. So we’ve written our own software. We’ve built our own hardware. So everything is us. Just so that we didn’t…

Piers: We haven’t used like, you know, a third party software like Android or anything. It’s our own operating system, our own embedded code. And that enables us to be super energy efficient.

Allison: How much energy does that fancy OLED display use?

Piers: Not very much at all. Because if you notice, most of it’s off.

Allison: Most of it’s black. There’s a light blue ring around the light switch.

Piers: Exactly. And actually, if we’re not in demo mode like we are now, when you walk away from it, it actually just turns off completely.

Allison: So you just tap the screen and it wakes up?

Piers: No, we’ve got a Doppler radar. So as you walk up to it, it comes to life.

Allison: Of course you do.

Piers: Yeah, of course you’re using Doppler.

Allison: Of course we do.

Piers: We put everything into these things.

Allison: You are a geek.

Piers: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, no, I’m not. My team are. I have a dream. And that’s what we’re trying to build.

Allison: So what questions have I forgotten to ask? Other than where did the name TEWKE come from? T-E-W-K-E.

Piers: Yeah, so TEWKE came from… Because I’m an old romantic. My wife came from a little village in England called Tewkesbury. But trying to start any company… This is probably my sixth company. So I’ve had a number of exits in the UK. I’m invested in gut health, education, fashion, and technology. And this is my first energy business.

Piers: But the problem with any company is trying to get a name. And I really wanted a dot com. Because if you want to go global, you need a dot com. And I also wanted to be one syllable and not mean a rude word in Korean or something. So you have to make a word up. So Tewkesbury, TEWKE, I thought I can do that. I hadn’t appreciated every nationality is going to call it something else.

Piers: So I think Tewk-y is the preference for Americans on the whole. But TEWKE is a bit like Nike or something else. But anyway…

Allison: There you go.

Piers: There you go. So it’s T-E-W-K-E.

Allison: And where would people go to find out more about it?

Piers: Just tewke.com.

Allison: That’s right. Dot com. I should have known that.

Piers: There we go.

Allison: And what’s your price on this?

Piers: So at the moment, we’re sort of in our MVP development mode. So we’re installing in London, in the UK. We are doing another raise. So we’re going to come to market in the US hopefully in the summer. And we will manufacture in the US. So we’ve made everything in-house. So we will bring it all to the America.

Piers: America is going to be the best market for this. I mean, this is… You guys have an amazing… You know, I used to live in Alaska and Colorado when I was younger. So I’ll be coming home with my English accent. But the idea is that we bring everything with us. It will be very, very, you know, DIY install through third parties and maybe through some, you know, larger distribution partners.

Piers: We’ve also designed it BOEM. So if, you know, if we have a big enough partner, we could give it to them a white label and then use the TEWKE software and platform to then run it.

Allison: Very good. This sounds fantastic. I hope you’re successful because it turns out that energy thing, that’s a real problem.

Piers: It is. And we anticipate, so one trillion dollars is wasted a year on energy consumption.

Allison: I think half of it’s at my house.

Piers: Yeah. Or mine. Because I’m not there. They’ve got everything on running at the moment.

Allison: Thank you very much for your time. This is great. Appreciate it.

Piers: Thank you very much.

Allison: Thank you.