Save Energy Together With A Lively Online Community

How the Winter Is Coming community can help you save up to 800 euros this winter!

Take a detour to save 20% fuel? That’s a real thing! (Spoiler at the bottom of this blog post.) You can find these and many more surprising tips on the Scone app, the leading community that helps people through tips, challenges, and reminders to save lots of energy and money with little effort. Not bad now that an expensive winter is approaching…

How does it work? Jan-Willem Rombouts, a Flemish entrepreneur who made his mark in Silicon Valley and his team of big data experts, designers and communication specialists have built an app that gives you smart, personalised energy-saving tips and keeps your motivation high.

Save energy: prevent the gym effect

You know the drill: in January you take out a gym membership and you really go for it. In February, things get busy at work and you slack off with your gym routine, then in March the gym phones you to prod you to come by again…

Clearly, knowledge and good intentions are not enough to sustain new behaviour.

Forming new habits also requires maintaining motivation and focus. Working out at the gym or running with a buddy or personal trainer will keep you going for longer. That’s simply human nature.

Winter Is Coming community: together we’re better

That’s why Scone offers the Winter Is Coming community, where people with the same goal—saving energy and money now—go for it together.

In the Winter Is Coming community you pick your own challenges, such as experimenting with colder showers for a week (or skip that one for now, brrr), turning down the heating by one degree, or taking the bike for trips under 5 km. And then adding another week to consolidate the new habit.

The app immediately shows how much electricity or petrol, euros, and CO₂ you have already saved.

Savings show in the app immediately

We calculate your savings in real-time based on standard data such as your house type, car brand, and completed challenges.

For instance, if you enter “my house is 100 m2, double glazing” in the onboarding quiz and you report your challenge “turn down heating by one degree for a week” as completed, we will roughly calculate your savings.

But if you link your home’s smart energy meter to the Scone app, we can give you a much more precise calculation.

The same goes for the Google location tracker: if you link it to Scone, we automatically keep track of how much you save by taking the bike for trips under 5 km, should you choose that challenge. Google can see whether you are walking, cycling, driving, or taking the bus.

(We only use that information to give you feedback, we don’t share your information with anyone. Our privacy policy is 100% watertight.)

The longer you use our app, the more precise the calculations that we can make for you. You’ll see the in-app counters of CO₂ and euros go up every day. Sweeet!

Serious gaming works

The Likes, Shares, Comments and photos of other people doing the same challenges as you will help you notch up your efforts. In turn, you can also encourage others with photos of your clever hacks. This way, saving energy becomes a kind of game, where you keep real euros/dollars/pounds in your pocket!

Recent action research from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands showed that an average household can reduce their energy consumption by up to 30% with this type of serious gaming (in Dutch).

Scone makes saving energy easy

Whether you want to save energy, water, and money for your wallet, the planet, or your grandchildren, the interactive and personal Scone app featuring the new Winter Is Coming community makes it all a lot easier and way more fun.

We have already figured out for you which actions pay off and which don’t or much less so. This way you’ll only take actions that make a real difference.

As for that detour that can save you 20% fuel: on a route with a lot of traffic lights, intersections, or speed bumps, you’ll use a lot more petrol (or gas, diesel, electricity, whatever your car type) due to all the energy-wasting braking and accelerating. An alternative route via a motorway, where you have a more even speed, can save up to one-fifth of fuel.

Download the Scone app and discover even more surprises in the Winter Is Coming community! See you there!

PS

Our developers add new functionalities to the app every week.

In the future, achievement badges, leaderboards, and the possibility to form teams to achieve common goals might be added—to, say, team up with your street, family, or colleagues.

If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you!