Connecting Tomorrow

Smart thermostats have been around for years.  They’re programmable, can heat and cool your home to your exact specifications and they’re affordable.  You definitely have to read the instruction manual to operate them properly but they aren’t rocket science.  There are a few fundamental problems with smart thermostats though.  They operate independently of any other system in your home and they only do what you tell them to do, when you tell them to do it.  They really aren’t that smart at all, they just know how to follow directions.  How can this be the answer to helping you save money on energy?

The answer is that the thermostat needs to be more in tune with what’s going on inside and outside your home on a real-time basis.  If it was integrated with various other systems in your home it would be able to do things like adjust the temperature accordingly based on room occupancy.  Raise or lower the temperature based on outdoor temperature to conserve energy.  Open or close the shades to increase or decrease temperature.  This list goes on.  The point is that your home could do all of this for you without your interaction.  No two days are the same when it comes to temperature, clouds, wind, etc.  Not to mention the fact that warm to me is cold to my wife.  How does it help you to program a thermostat to set your home to a specified temperature range based on the time of day?

The thermostat shouldn’t be independent.  Brian McConnell suggests making thermostats a piece of Wi-Fi equipment that could hook into your home network with no additional configuration.  Plug and play.  This is a start.  A truly smart thermostat that could read data from external weather web sites that could control your home more efficiently.  Smart, easy and cost-effective.

Another method is to integrate a home control system that lets your home think on its own when it comes to energy.  You could give your home a brain that would behave based on guidelines set for your part of the country by NOAA or another reliable source of weather information.  A system that is smart enough to understand all of the factors that contribute to energy consumption in your home.  It knows when you’re home, when you’re sleeping, when it’s hot outside, if it’s cloudy or if it’s raining.  You’re not there to babysit your energy all day and somebody needs to do it.  Let your home do it for you. 

These types of systems are becoming a reality and the technology to make it happen is available from a company called Agilewaves whose Resource Monitor product integrates all your home’s internal systems.  Electric, gas, water, you name it.  Resource Monitor properly integrated with a home control system like Control4 gives your home complete autonomy based on your specifications.  Now if someone could just solve the NOAA part we’d be all set.

People will argue that the expense of such systems isn’t worth it because you can program things on your own with cheap devices like smart thermostats.  We couldn’t disagree more.  It’s just not effective.  People could do it if they wanted to because the functionality is there but they just don’t do it because they forget or because it’s inconvienent.  A smart home can’t forget.