A DESPAIRING dad who created an energy ‘egg’ to curb his family’s extravagant electricity use has cracked America with his eco-friendly invention.

Brian O’Reilly, 37, was at his wit’s end with his three children leaving TVs and computers on, wasting energy and making him shell out his hard earned money on electricity bills.
So Brian went to his workshop and hatched an idea for the ‘Energy EGG’, which uses clever technology to sense when a room is empty and turn off unused electrical devices.
Confident he had a winning invention Brian left his job as a software engineer and began to market the product.
He soon gained interest from retailers John Lewis and Tesco, but Brian’s product really began to take off last month when his signed a deal to distribute an initial 100,000 Energy EGGS to hundreds of stores in the US.
Brian, who now employs four full time staff, said: ‘It’s been a long hard slog and we still have a long way to go but we are getting there. I’ve always been quite concerned about energy efficiency and recycling, which is our main focus, and I found it quite difficult with my wife and kids to get everything switched off. It was always down to me to do the trawl at the end of the night. I thought, it doesn’t have to be like this - we’ve got the technologies out there to do this automatically and it’s simple. I won’t be happy until we are in a big office with 500 employees, but the company is expanding and we have had a lot of interest.’
The Energy EGG is based on technology similar to that in household alarm systems which use motion sensors to detect whether someone is in the room.
The sleek-looking device is linked wirelessly to a control adaptor - similar to a multi-way plug - into which multiple electrical goods are connected. It then senses when a room is unoccupied and kills the power to those items. The technology, which was developed along with the University of Strathclyde where Brian’s company is based, also gives a one minute warning before cutting power.
Brian was so confident of his invention’s potential he first went part time and then three years ago quit his job to concentrate on the product, which he launched under his own company ‘TreeGreen’.                  –DM