For me, being involved with Home Automation is a glimpse into the future, where our buildings become more intelligent, energy efficient and make us more energy use aware as the energy prices increase.
Home Automation can be a very interesting, fun hobby as well as an energy saver. If you have some technical skills, have understanding of electrical wiring, you should give it a try. The rest of you, well give the guys who do automation for living a call for a consultation. It may save you some money in the long run. How much exactly depends on many factors such as the system itself, extent of automation, amount of energy you will save using the system, etc.. It is not possible to generalize the ROI on such system. Automation is a system and implementation specific issue.
There are many automation systems out there, but in this write-up we will take a look at INSTEON Home Automation available for purchase from Smarthome.
INSTEON is based on home area networking (HAN) using radio frequency waves and power line technology utilizing existing wiring lines in your home. In my experience the system is very reliable and can be bullet-proofed by additional programming that can report events such as low battery in motion sensor or send you an E-mail when your home is unattended and there is some activity detected that you want to keep an eye on. Many other features are possible.
What can you do with Home Automation in the most simplistic terms?
- Control lights (ON/OFF, dimming) or have them turn ON / OFF at some predetermined logic
- Use of motions sensors to enable lighting when a human presence is detected
- Control your indoor and outdoor Christmas lights automatically based on calculated sundown time and some time cycle.
- Control other loads – appliances, motors, etc. A pool pump for example is pretty energy intensive device. Reduce the run time by setting up a timer or run fully when solar power is available.
- Visualize what loads are ON / OFF as the switch buttons light up
- Monitor / control your devices via computer or a smart phone
- Monitor / control status of your garage or other doors
- Monitor your freezer temperature or basement water levels (hopefully not!) and send automatic notifications
- Interface with other systems like alarms, energy monitoring systems, HVAC controls (thermostat), weather information systems such as WeatherBug, etc.
- Integrate and control your home theatre devices, lighting scenes, motorized window shades, etc.
- Many other features – Visit Smarthome learning centre to see what the system is about and what it can do for you.
About my Home Automation system:
The automation system is interfaced with my Local Area Network and my energy monitoring system. I’m able to monitor and control the devices, programs and scenes using our home computers, my Android phone and if I wanted to, I could control the system over the Internet. Presently, I have chosen not to do so for the security reasons.
The heart of my system is ISY-99i controller from Universal Devices that allows me to manage and control all 15 Insteon capable devices I own, programmed with custom behaviours.
I have several motion sensors that are used along with other switches, outlets and in some case logic related to sunrise and sundown. For example, I have a motion sensor that is linked with a multi button keypad and controls the front porch light. The porch light only comes on after dark and turns of 3 minutes later if no motion is detected. Enough time to take care of the business at the door. The button lights up anytime the light is on outside. I have this same button programmed to overwrite the motion sensor that will leave the porch light on for an hour should I want to do any work there at night. A button right next to is dedicated to disabling the motion detector program should I decide I want to sit outside in a total darkness. If I press the button during the day to turn the porch light ON, another program will turn it off 3 seconds later. Why waste energy if there is a light outside...
One other feature of my porch light control is the fact that the signal is available within the automation system for other security related features. For example I can define a scene that will dim or flash the upstairs lights if my music is playing too loud and someone is at the door. At night the interior house lights on the first floor can be programmed to come ON if someone is at the door and so ON.
The multi button keypad switches inform you which scenes or loads are ON or Off by controlling LEDs in each individual button. Creating virtual three or more way circuits is matter of minutes. Your imagination is your limit.
Being efficiency conscious (I do an energy balance from time to time professionally) I just had to solve one of my pet-peeves: vampire loads. Vampire or phantom loads are created by appliances in standby mode such as cable boxes, TVs, computers, etc. that are waiting on a signal from a remote control. For more info on phantom loads look up Wiki. Most of the cable boxes are terrible offenders in this category since these are using energy to decode information even when your TV is OFF. Just put your hand over top of the box. Hot? This means the device is converting electrical energy to heat. Heater is not it’s intended use. It just means that it is not very efficient, slowly pulling money out of your packet.
The vampire loads add up very quickly. On average 5-10% of household energy use is attributed to these vampire loads. On a national scale, the cost of this wasted energy add up to a couple of billion dollars annually.
So here is my Vampire load reduction solution #1:
At night when we hit the sac, I kill all of the vampire loads controlled by the Insteon network with press of a single button. Whenever these are needed, you can enable the loads using Insteon capable switches throughout the house.
Vampire load solution #2:
The main entry door SwitchLinc keypad has “Away” button that turns off all non essential Insteon loads off when we leave our home. Upon returning home, press the “Away” button again and loads are enabled again.
To gain understanding of the usage, I monitor our household energy use with help of the energy monitoring system from Brultech. This system is also interfaced with my Insteon Home Automation system, allowing me to create events based on energy utilization, such as particular channels or power use levels. My next project is to write a bit of code and start logging the energy usage in a database on micro-server running Linux.
The reason for this project is to have the data and a graphical representation of your total usage as well as usage of multiple individual and combined circuits in one of the most traveled spaces in the house – the kitchen. I envision an Android tablet for this display function displaying what is going on energy and cost wise in the real time and also graphing history and trends. Other means of accessing the database, monitoring and control will of course be possible via home computer, a gaming console, basically all devices with access to your local area network and web browser.
The reason for displaying usage, current energy prices, how much money you are burning up in energy, etc. is really quite simple: What you can’t see, you can’t manage.
Once you understand where you are using power, how much and when you will be able to modify your habits, put energy conservation measures into a place and in the long term, save some dollars. With the implementation of smart meters and Time of Use energy billing, the change in energy usage behaviour becomes even more so important. Some folks will get a rude awakening in a form of high electricity bills that will hopefully force them to start asking questions as to why, become more informed on the subject and take an action. This signifies what I hope for is a start of an energy consciousness trend in the North America.
In addition to that statement, I would also like to offer a simple and free advice: If you don’t need it, turn it OFF!
My Home Automation exploits can be viewed as just a hobby, but I like to think of myself as becoming a trend setter. How about you? What do you think?
I most certainly like to spend my money on more fun things, not the energy bills.
The energy prices are still relatively low, keeping the average person uninterested in investing into such systems and more energy efficient buildings and appliances in general.
What gets me is that we constantly talk about reducing our impact on the environment, that we should be thinking about preserving precious fossil fuels for better use down the road for the future generations, but mostly take little or no action.
With the changing supply / demand situation the energy prices have no other place to go, only upwards. At some point in not so distant future, we will start scrambling to get a better grasp on our energy use and operational cost reduction in our buildings and other infrastructure.
Automation is certainly one way of doing it.
