The Smart Home Revolution: Powering Sustainability

The Current Landscape

Smart home technology continues to get better, cheaper, and smaller. Protocols such as Matter also make devices more usable by consumers than ever. In our last post, we showed some downsides to this, as well as how Home Assistant can help. We do believe that this trend is, in general, a good thing though. One of our favourite side effects of this is reducing home energy use. Platforms like Home Assistant are key tools for harnessing and making use of device data.

Gone are the days of it only being convenient to turn the bedroom lights off without getting out of bed. Gone are the days of turning the Christmas tree lights on with a little remote. Having those as manual tasks still relies on a human to remember to turn them off. If you've ever woken up and the Christmas lights have still been on, you know this is not a perfect solution.

With presence sensors and platforms like Home Assistant. This means we can ensure devices are only on when you need them, saving you time and money.

How Smart Homes Optimise Energy Use

The most popular smart device in homes these days is likely to be the smart meter. Energy companies have been giving them away and they offer a great snapshot of your home energy use. But that's all they are most of the time, a snapshot. You might get access to a portal where you can see historic data and some guesses about which devices were in use. But when you switch from that provider, you'll lose that data, because you don't own it.

Want access to your historic data, forever? Reach out and we can walk you through the possibilities!

The number of devices we have available now are staggering. A few of these we've installed in our customers homes are:

• Smart Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRVs)

• Smart blinds/curtains

• Door and window sensors

• Presence sensors (millimetreWave/PIR/BLE depending on the use case)

You've likely seen the standard outdoor floodlights that operate in many back gardens. When you walk within the range of their PIR sensor, they turn on. Then after a set time, they turn back off again. The issue with this is that if you're still doing something but not moving a lot, this plunges you into darkness! A quick Eddie The Eagle impression later and you have light again. But what if that sensor was smart enough to stay on because it knew you were still there?

Even better, what if this could happen to all your lighting indoors? What if they could turn on only if there's a person in the room, and then turn off when nobody needs them? No more reminding the kinds to turn bedroom lights off. No more following behind guests and turning things off for them.

Ever realised that the heating's on but someone's left a window open upstairs... All that precious, costly energy going to waste! With a window sensor and a smart thermostat your home could notify you of that. Even easier - you could have a smart TRV valve turn only that particular radiator off for you! That way you don't have to rush home or spend all day worrying about fixable problems like these.

Impact on Reducing Carbon Footprints

Nielsen conducted a study on sustainability in 2019. They found that 73 % of global consumers intended to change their consumption habits. This piece from Forbes suggests that consumers can reduce their impact by up to 12.8% with the help of a smart home. They attribute this to 'peak shifting' - being able to move peak energy loads to more desirable times. Think of running the dishwasher or tumble dryer overnight instead of when you get home from work.

Examples of Energy-Saving Automations

We've added several other energy saving automations to our customers homes:

• Only illuminating the path to the bathroom if someone gets up at night

• Eliminates the need for permanent 'night lights'

• Smart blinds to block out the sun indoors on hot days

• Reducing sunsoak and eliminating the needs for fans or air conditioning

• Energy use gamification

• Great for kids to improve their knowledge and contribute to reducing consumption

Ideas rattling round in your head now? Set up a consultation with us and let’s make it happen!

What The Future Holds For Combating Climate Change

The more that battery technology improves, the more renewables will be viable. Not only at the level of national grids, but for individual homes - the Tesla Powerwall is an early example of this. Homes would then be able to switch between energy inputs at peak times. They would be able to shut off certain high power devices in the event of a power cut. This results in longer battery life for critical devices, such as dialysis machines.