LIVING SMARTER
Cut your utility bills and stop wasting energy by making your house smarter
Save money on your electricity bill this summer by turning window sensors into a remote off-switch for your fan
A smart home kit is, well, smart. This type of kit is smart enough that it can often go beyond its intended purpose. Case in point: window sensors. At first glance they seem like security devices, there to alert you of unwanted ingress, and to prevent you from leaving a window open while you’re away from home. But why stop there? A window sensor is a perfect trigger for more advanced routines, as long as you buy the right type of sensor.
Something like Yale’s Door and Window contact (£ 21.52), for example, wouldn’t be the best pick in this scenario since it’s tied to the Yale Smart Alarm system; it’s perfect there, but here you are looking for something with IFTTT or Stringify support. Energenie’s Mi|Home Alert Bundle (£110 for the required hub and two sensors) is a better option, as its open and close actions are supported by IFTTT, so you can use them to trigger something else.
When the weather’s warm, you might have a fan going to keep you cool. But if you open a window, having the fan on is a waste of energy. Hook the fan up to a smart socket controlled by the window sensor, and now you can automatically kill the blades when you open the window.
Ready to go one step further? IFTTT’s routines are generally restricted to one
Set up a Stringify routine that triggers when two windows are open
trigger, one action, but you could use Stringify to set up a new routine that triggers only when two windows are open at the same time and there’s a breeze coming through. Stringify compatible window sensors are a little hard to come by, but there is a work-around: if it works with IFTTT, you can use it to trigger a Stringify flow.