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Home Automation and Energy Management – Is education the answer?

With ever-changing energy prices, continuing developments in our awareness of climate change and a growing demand for energy efficient products, the AV community are one of the industries looking at ways of improving its efforts towards the environment.

As a Custom Installer, we are increasingly being challenged by more clients to deliver energy efficient solutions to their homes, and developments such as LED technology in smart TVs & projectors and smart ‘proximity detecting’ thermostats show that the industry is keen to oblige.

Even as I look around my living room, I perceive all the items that I am going to need to fiddle with before I head up to bed; light switch, TV, Digital box, thermostat… This may only take a few minutes each day, which isn’t much time in the grand scheme of energy saving, but how appealing is it for one intelligent monitoring system to do all this for you, making energy management one less thing to worry about?

Over £740 million of electricity is used in Britain every year by TV sets and other gadgets left on standby. By programming a single button on a touch panel, most electronic devices are then dealt with and you can rest assured that electricity is not being used needlessly, costing you money. The fact that we are even able to remotely control a system from phone/tablet apps such and via internet from anywhere in the world, means we are running out of excuses not to invest in a solution.

The problem seems to be that customers aren’t buying. Reports have indicated that sales of existing monitoring systems haven’t been great, but is this because people don’t know enough about them? I like the analogy used in a report from Frog Design – “it’s like the difference between filling out a jogging mileage log or using Nike+” – By informing and educating, we can help customers to take an interest in the fundamentals of energy saving, understand why energy management is so important and how the amount they can save using it as part of a home automation system is significant.

The lack of customer response seems to be reflecting on the Home automation market; Control4 appears to be taking a step back from energy efficient products (“until the company has market-ready energy management products to talk about…we’re not saying much” CEO Martin Plaehn), which is surprising as they spent years working at encouraging consumers to go green. Google and Microsoft are two company giants that seem to have left the energy management market altogether.

Crestron however are sticking to their guns, showcasing their new Fusion EM software in 2011 which boasts a complete energy management solution for any size organisation.

Hopefully this is a sign of things to come from other companies. The problem of global warming is not going to disappear and needs to be addressed by homeowners; perhaps once they understand the implications a proper energy management system will have on their time and energy bills, they will see that the investment is worthwhile.

 

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