Viderus.

Electricity costs a different amount every half hour. Your house doesn’t know that.

Viderus runs the big energy users in a home — the car, the hot water, the heating — so they draw power when it is cheapest. Quietly, in the background, without anyone having to think about it.

Car charges Water heats Peak — nothing runs here midnight midday midnight
where Viderus puts the load
the price of a kilowatt-hour through the day
Irish suppliers now offer tariffs whose price follows the wholesale market every half hour. Almost nothing in a house can respond to that. Timers are fixed and solar diverters only see what is happening this second — neither of them follows a curve.

What it does

Decides

Works out when each device should run, using the tariff, the weather forecast and what the household actually needs — hot water by morning, a charged car by the time it is needed.

Checks

Confirms that every instruction actually delivered energy. A command that heats nothing means a fault, and the household hears about it before the shower runs cold.

Stays quiet

No app to open, no dashboard to watch. Settings are chosen once. After that it should be possible to forget the thing exists.

Where it is

In development. The system runs continuously on a live installation in Ireland, controlling an EV charger and hot water against a real half-hourly tariff. A pilot with an energy supplier is the next step. It is not yet available to buy.

Who is behind it

Viderus was founded by John FitzGerald, who has spent thirty years in Irish energy infrastructure — as Director of Grid Development and Interconnection at EirGrid, as Project Director of the East West Interconnector, and as chief executive of SuperNode, a superconducting transmission company. He co-founded CurrENT Europe, the advocacy body for grid-enhancing technologies, and holds an engineering degree and an MBA from University College Dublin.

The work began at home, instrumenting his own house to find out where the money in an electrified home actually goes.