WARREN — St. Joseph Warren Hospital wants to reduce its reliance on the power grid and optimize efficiency. Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority wants to know when residents either abandon their homes or have their water shut off to avoid costly repairs if a pipe bursts.

Those are two real challenges faced by the hospital and public housing agency that project managers, engineers, designers, developers and college students will try to creatively solve this month when at BRITE Energy Innovators for the incubator’s second energy-focused civic hackathon.

It will happen Jan. 31 at BRITE’s downtown Warren office and energy testing lab.

And in addition to developing meaningful solutions that have potential to positively impact the community, it’s a chance for participants to make new connections and network.

“I’m never going to promise a $1 billion company is going to come out of one of these hackathons, but I do hope that people get some cross-fertilization, meet some people they have never met before, that we can get people’s brains moving in a meaningful direction and give some positive work toward the community,” said Rick Stockburger, BRITE’s president and CEO.

“Our role in this is really about being a convener and trying to bring people with different backgrounds and different skill sets together to create dynamic teams that can change the fabric of the community,” Stockburger said.

Registration for the 2020 BRITEhack, available under Events at brite.org, closes Wednesday. Upon registration, people will be asked to select the challenge that most interests them. Teams will be assembled before the event based on skill sets and the day of, they will develop solutions to the issues and then present those at the end of day. Winners of each challenge will receive $1,000.

“Our hope is that one of the teams comes up with a really great idea that TMHA (or St. Joe’s) can implement and big picture dreaming, this actually becomes a product specifically for this market and a company comes out of it, but that’s a dream,” Stockburger said.

At the first hackathon in 2018, the teams studied and presented solutions to energy issues in Warren’s Water Pollution Control Department.

Don Emerson, TMHA’s executive director, said pipe bursts don’t happen often, but when they do the repair bill has been $1,000 to upward of $10,000.

“We have had situations where pipes have burst because the residents, who are individually metered, may have had their water turned off and we are not aware of that and so from our standpoint, if we are given a heads up that a resident’s water has been turned off because they are late paying their bill, then we can take some proactive action ahead of time,” Emerson said.

That action, he said, includes getting the residents connected with services that can provide payment help.

The team working on TMHA’s challenge will be tasked with designing a sensor that can determine occupancy status across several property types. Emerson said there may be application for gas and electric utilities, too.

Hackers working on St. Joes’ challenge will develop ways to increase efficiency and reduce the reliance on the grid.

Said Wayne Tennant, vice president of support services for Mercy Health, which operates St. Joe’s, when the hospital was approached to be a test for the hackathon on the outcomes he would like to see: “How can we increase the reliability of the utility, what can we do to assure we have greater capacity in our backup power when we need it, what would the future look like in terms of how could we get off the grid, what can we do to support the operations differently?”

“The systems in place work for us as they are currently, but when the hackathon came about, it’s like what do we do in the future and that’s where I’m tapping into,” Tennant said.

The hospital consumes about 800,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, or enough to power 80 to 100 homes annually, Tennant said.

St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital near downtown Youngstown uses three times as much power, so ideas developed Jan. 31 may be used across the greater Mercy Health system.

rselak@tribtoday.com

If you go …

WHAT: 2020 BRITEhack

WHERE: BRITE Energy Innovators, 125 W. Market St., Warren

WHEN: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 31

DETAILS: Participants will develop energy-related ideas to help St. Joseph Warren Hospital with efficiency and power grid use, and Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority with notification when a resident leaves or has their water shut off.

REGISTRATION: Closes Wednesday. Available at BRITE’s website, www. brite.org, under Events

COST: Free