How I Made It: Martin Dix, Founder of Current Cost

The Sunday Times
March 8, 2009
Lig ht bu lb showed homeowners how to save electricity

IF 10 people were asked to guess how much it costs to power a 100 watt light bulb left on for a year, the chances are they would all come up with different answers. It was questions such as these that inspired Martin Dix to create a monitor that records how much electricity a household uses — and what it costs.
The youngest of five children, Dix was born in Yorkshire but his family moved around a lot as his father worked in sales. Dix went to three secondary schools as a result, and left at 15 without qualifications.
He did, however, love science. He said: “I remember making this mood switch when I was 14 that changed the lighting
in my bedroom, and put on Simon and Garfunkel at the same time, in the vain hope that I would have a girlfriend to impress at some point.”
Dix got an apprenticeship with an engineering firm but by the age of 21 felt he needed a change and became a lab technician. In the 1980s he turned landlord, buying his first house in Harrogate by putting the deposit on his credit card and letting out rooms. With the money he made he started up a small business adapting Japanese imported cars for the British market.
He managed to turn his business into a franchised network but when the government introduced a single vehicle test that was impossible for his Japanese cars to pass, he closed the firm.
Dix spent the next two years doing temporary odd jobs, such as DIY repairs, building work and landscape gardening. Then on New Year’s Day 2004 he suddenly had his big idea — the household electricity monitor. “It was about allowing people to still enjoy their usage but illustrating where the waste was,” he said.
Key to his idea was reaching as many people as possible — and not just those already committed to saving energy. Dix decided to create a monitor that would be cheap enough for energy companies to give away to their customers.
He said: “One could create a device that the early adopters in green issues might wish to buy, but I always felt that those people were probably already doing the right things, such as getting energy-
saving light bulbs and turning off water. Also not interesting to me were the people who didn’t give a damn, because they were never going to change. So for me the real idea was how I could make a difference to the middle 80% of people.”
To test his theory, Dix started asking people if they knew how much it would cost to power a light bulb if you left it on for a year. “If I asked people what a pint of beer or a litre of petrol cost, they would know immediately,” he said. “But they didn’t know about the cost of a light bulb, so I got every answer between £2 and £200. What the real answer was didn’t really matter, it was that people didn’t know.” (The answer is about £80.)
Excited by his discovery, Dix flew to China — paying for the trip with his credit card — to see if the monitor he wanted to make could be manufactured cheaply enough there to make his business model work. It could, but back home he was unable to drum up interest from people he had hoped would invest in his venture.
“Most of the people I went to see just didn’t get it,” he said. “Despite my field trip they felt it would be too expensive or that the energy companies would have no interest in getting people to reduce the use of their core product.”
Dix persevered, though, believing that his monitor would appeal to the energy companies as a way of meeting the obligations laid down by the Kyoto protocol on climate change. He found two partners and they put in £5,000 each. In 2005 Scottish and Southern Energy gave them a £250,000 grant to make 5,000 Current Cost units so it could test them over a year.
Just two months into the trial the results were so positive that Scottish and Southern Energy started to order more monitors. Last year Eon, another energy company, began to order monitors too.
The monitor works by recording the amount of electricity that comes through the electricity meter, calculating how much that costs in pounds and pence, then displaying it on a screen that can be placed in the kitchen or elsewhere in the house. The device tracks electricity as it is used, which means it can show instantly when usage goes up or down.
Dix, who has a 50% stake in the business, has now sold 400,000 monitors and Current Cost will have a turnover of £6m this year.
Now aged 48 and divorced with two children, one of whom works for the company, Dix is motivated by more than making money. “It is great, but I think for me it is making a difference to somebody that is incredibly rewarding,” he said. His aim now is to create a whole range of monitors for different types of homes.
He is clear about the secret of his success. “Recognising what I am good at and doing that to the best of my ability — but, equally importantly, recognising what I can’t do so well and getting other people in to fill those gaps.”