The Design Perspective

Many people ask me what they can do with home automation to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.

From an electronics standpoint, the most important things you can do are: Good insulation, good windows, geothermal HVAC, and radiant floor heating.

Those are the most important things other than some operational activities, like keeping your doors and windows closed when it’s really cold or hot outside.

Next most important are (here’s what you were really looking for): integrated lighting and temperature controls integrated with your security system.  Advanced security systems like the ones we install not only provide improved security, but also take their sensor data and send it to the other systems in the home. 

Now the Temperature control and lighting systems know when rooms are unoccupied and can take steps to reduce their energy demand.

I design for a balance of energy conservation needs. From the extreme automated home, to basic temperature setback.  Humidity control can add a lot to your energy bill, but the alternative is cracking woodwork and damaged furnishings.    Thoughtfully designed automation can reduce the negative impact and even provide opportuninties for free cooling and heating using enthalpy control.  No special or elaborate hardware is required to accomplish this beyond the usual temperature control systems we install.  It’s the supervisory software we create that does all the work.  I’ll blog later about a project we’re wrapping up this month that has 4 geothermal units and integrated HVAC controls.

Information is Power.  A single watt meter on your service, combined with the data from the control system (remotes) can provide enough data to produce valuable information about your home’s current consumption. This can tell you if you have left power hungry devices on or even if an appliance like a refrigerator, water heater, or A/C unit is starting to fail.

When we prewire to TV locations, we always run the power back to a central location–typically the media rack.  While this provides central power conditioning, it also has the benefit of allowing us to completely turn off TVs and “vampire” power packs when they are not being used.  The remote system handles all the power control so it’s transparent to the homeowner.  Phantom power accounts for almost 5% of the average household power bill.  With several TVs in a larger home, this feature has less than a 1 year ROI!

All this talk about insulation further emphasizes the importance of adequate prewire (prewire for the reasonable future).   Normally, we can retrofit wires from an unfinished basement or crawlspace up into the walls above.  But it’s a costly pain-in-the-hoo-hoo to fish wires through sprayed foam insulation.  It also disturbes the insulation which then needs to be repaired for maxumum effect.