4 Ways to Save Energy with Home Automation
Being able to control your heating and cooling allows you to control nearly 50% of your energy spending. Technologies such as smart thermostats, smart appliances and smart lighting, can be managed independently or be programmed to control energy usage and increase savings.
Reduce Your Energy Costs
Why pay to heat or cool an empty room? With automated climate control, heating and cooling can be turned off and on, or raised or lowered depending on the activity in a room. Over the course of months, savings accumulate through the use of automated climate control and can add up to significant savings. When combined with other home automation features, this can provide a large cost savings impact and reduction in overall energy usage.
Automate Lighting Control in your Home
How many times have you left your home and forgot to turn a light off or even just left a room and were too exhausted or too busy to run back and turn off the light. Nothing worse than almost falling asleep and realizing you left a light on and having to get out of your warm bed to shut off that light. With a lighting control system this can be achieved by simply pressing a button on your smartphone or tablet.
You can program your settings to turn on/off at a specific time or change your home’s lighting from anywhere in the world. You can automatically dim your lights or program them to turn off at key times of the day. In homes with children, leaving lights on when leaving a room is a constant struggle – the struggle is over, as you can now do that task from anywhere. This ease of use and customization combines to add significant savings to your electric bill.
Schedule your Optimum Energy Usage
Energy management can be easily integrated into your smart home systems. For example, solar panel systems can be monitored with a touch of a screen or access to an app allowing you to monitor electrical production and schedule functions which draw the most power accordingly. Many of these tasks can be handled automatically giving you the ability to increase your savings provided by your solar panels without having to worry about changing the settings manually.
Eliminate Phantom Energy Use
Many of your household appliances draw a surprising amount of power even while turned off. This is known as phantom energy use and is increasingly common with appliance that are left in “energy friendly” modes while idling or dormant. The term “energy friendly” is not exactly an appropriate name for a device such as a computer or TV that isn’t actually serving a purpose but is still drawing power.
The old solution to this problem was running around your house and unplugging appliances. With smart technology you can tie devices into your energy management systems allowing you to easily negate the standby modes with a preset program. They can also be controlled from your smartphone device or even with a voice command allowing you to increase your monthly savings.
