Efficient smart homes
Cut your bills and save the environment — you don’t need to use all that power
Looking for a way to reduce your home’s carbon footprint? These smart devices aid towards cutting your bills and saving power all at the same time.
Energy prices are not going down. The average standard tariff is now some 20 per cent more expensive than it was five years ago, and production prices, even as energy companies transition to renewables, will rise for some time to come.
So what can be done? Reducing the ecological and economic aspects of energy use is very much a personal thing. It’s on us to use less energy in the first place. Switching off high–drain items when they’re not in use, using more efficient hardware and, most importantly, becoming aware of how much energy we’re using.
Over the page, we’ve pulled out some of the cleverer offerings from the smart plug market. These go further than the standard power– switching variety, keeping tabs on how much juice is flowing through them at any one time. We’re not suggesting you place one on every outlet in your home — recouping the expense from the
savings you might make would take time — but having one or two could be a boon to finding out what’s drawing so much power.
While not all smart plugs are created equal, even the dumber end of the market has advantages over the cheap remote–controlled relays you can pick up in hardware stores. Using services like IFTTT (or the hardware’s own app), you can tie a smart plug neatly into your daily routine, switching off that multi–plug when you go to bed, or use it remotely, firing up an energy–hungry heater when you’re heading home rather than leaving it on all day. Getting the most out of smart plugs is often a very creative enterprise, and the reward is that they’ll adapt to just about any home or situation. The little things Smart plugs offer insight into individual appliances, but that’s not all you can do. Devices like the Smappee Energy ($249) install directly into your circuit breaker panel, and can zero in on the power signatures of individual devices (using submetering). Once you’ve done a little sleuthing and labelled its readings, you can use your iOS device to keep tabs on the biggest power–drawing culprits house–wide.
Switching to other types of smart kit can also make a decent impact on your monthly bills. Like smart plugs, smart LED lights (such as Philips’ Hue bulbs) can be switched on or off manually from anywhere or controlled with automated routines. Also, they can be efficiently dimmed for instances where you don’t need full brightness, and their use of LEDs means they’re not overly demanding of electricity. Their need to communicate with a central hub does mean that they will continue to operate in standby mode unless switched off at the wall, but, in comparison to alternative options, this only draws a small amount of power.
You could go extreme and replace all of your appliances and screens. Again, however, this would be somewhat of a false economy if you were to throw out perfectly good hardware. Before you buy any appliance, check to see if it has an Energy Star label, which will detail the consumption you can expect to see from that device for average use. The program is still voluntary, and therefore not every product will have it, but it's a good habit to get into. Going big Reducing costs over your whole home will make the biggest impact. Smart thermostats are more than a simple convenience; again, they can be set to disengage when you’re not at home, and even sense when you’re not around (in the case of Nest, at least) and cut the heat automatically. It’s a trivial task to link them to window and door sensors to stop pumping out the heat if you’re letting it escape. But why stop there?
The smart device world tends to follow trends – and the trend right now is to make things more granular. Devices like Tado’s Smart Radiator Thermostat (about $90) and Smart AC Control V2 (about $200) offer precise control of the heat in individual rooms, auto–adjusting to match your preferred temperature, or tweaking specific rooms at certain times. There’s little sense in heating a study or office after bedtime, and it's the same for spinning a fan when it’s already cool indoors.
If you’re seriously dedicated to energy saving, solar panels are a great choice. They’re questionable in terms of recouping costs — even if your energy provider gives you a kickback for supplying power to the grid, you might never make back the installation fee. But why send that excess energy back? Tesla’s Powerwall (from $6,700) and other cheaper alternatives store the extra juice for later use. It’s an extreme investment, but a glimpse at what’s possible for those who are serious about conserving energy, and are looking for an effective method of reducing waste of it in their home.