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Tending to a spark: Developing tools to understand home heating

By Alana Vilagi
July 6, 2026

When I moved from California to Fairbanks, I quickly realized how challenging it can be to plan for Alaska winters. In Interior Alaska, the long cold season makes heating essential, and many households rely on expensive, imported heating oil. Yet most residents have little access to detailed, day-to-day information about how much fuel they use.

Existing monitoring systems are often expensive, difficult to install or require modifying fuel lines. As a result, it’s hard to collect this kind of data at scale. Without it, homeowners have limited insight into how weather, behavior or home efficiency affects their heating fuel consumption.

The development of PuMA

To address this gap, the Alaska Center for Energy and Power began developing a more practical solution. In 2014, researchers started work on the Pump Monitoring Apparatus, or PuMA, a device designed to measure heating oil use in real time without requiring changes to a home’s fuel system. The goal was simple — to provide detailed, hourly data on how much fuel a home uses.

The project was initiated by ACEP researcher Tom Johnson and founding director Gwen Holdmann along with then-undergraduate mechanical engineering student Bax Bond.

I joined the project in 2016 as a master’s student in mechanical engineering. At the time, PuMA was still in its early stages, and much of the work involved building and refining prototypes by hand.

Early testing in four Fairbanks homes showed that the system could successfully track heating oil use and reveal patterns in how people heated their homes. For example, one homeowner using the setback feature on their Toyo stove (a vented heater designed for indoor use without chimneys or ductwork) used roughly half as much heating oil as others. In another case, a sudden spike in fuel use revealed that the front door was accidentally left open.

Evolving designs and expanding applications

With our initial design, we needed to have the device in hand to collect data. To address this limitation, we added remote data access to the second generation of PuMA and expanded installations of the device into other Alaska communities. In Tanana, 130 air miles from Fairbanks on the confluence of the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, we installed PuMAs in 11 homes to monitor residential heating fuel use and provide the community with feedback on seasonal heating fuel expenses.

Up to this point, Bax and I had made the PuMAs laboriously by hand. Over time, the project evolved from “breadboard” (a flat, plastic board with many small holes that allows you to easily connect and test electronic components without soldering) prototypes into a manufacturable tool with near-real-time monitoring capabilities. We worked with engineering and fabrication partners to transition the PuMA into a scalable system that could support larger research and community energy efforts across Alaska.

In the Fairbanks North Star Borough, installations expanded to 41 homes. Researchers also used PuMA in Kotzebue to measure changes in energy use before and after heat pump installations.

The PuMA has helped researchers, organizations and communities better understand residential heating patterns — filling a long-standing gap in social and economic data. Support from the program allowed our team to create a physical prototype, thoroughly test it, gather data on residential heating and grow the PuMA into a manufacturable product with easy data access from any location. While PuMA development is currently paused, the next phase of the device will be built on a software update and a new sensor for reading fuel pump activity. By making fuel use visible, tools like PuMA can support more informed decisions about energy efficiency, weatherization and new technologies, contributing to energy resilience across Alaska.

PuMA development was supported by the Alaska Hub for Energy Innovation and Deployment as part of the Office of Naval Research-funded program.

The work relates to Department of Navy awards N00014-22-1-2049 and N00014-17-SB001 issued by the Office of Naval Research. In addition, the work in Tanana was done with support from National Science Foundation Award #1740075, “,” and the Fairbanks and Kotzebue studies were funded by the NSF project Award #1522836, “Collaborative research: Using field experiments to understand household barriers to energy efficiency in Alaska.”

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Alana Vilagi is a research professional with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power.