Why You Really Need a Home Automation System

Yes, we’ve said it before: a home automation system is a key to having effective energy efficiency in your house, and here’s why:

According to surveys by consumer green research company The Shelton Group, Americans are typically willing to pay more than $100 more a month than their current rate in energy bills before taking action on making their homes more energy efficient. Even though our consciousness about energy efficiency is growing;and more and more people embrace it as a way to save money—we either don’t act on our intentions or don’t know how to go about it.

The Shelton Group also found that the average number of energy-efficient home improvements was 2.6, versus about four improvements needed to foster significant energy savings.
Many of us just don’t do energy efficiency upgrades because they are a big pain in the you-know-what. And who wants to keep track of their energy usage, even with a cool energy monitoring system? We need something more.

The Automated Energy Diet

Today there are lots of energy-saving technologies and energy monitoring solutions, but an energy monitoring system alone is like having a scale to check your weight. That’s nice, but what are you actually going to do to lose that weight? That’;s where an energy management system comes in.

CHECK OUT: 5 Smart WiFi Thermostats to Make Your Home More Energy Efficient

For example, Savant’s SmartEnergy Monitor works with the Savant home automation system to give energy information and allow someone to use that information to turn off lights, or set the thermostat back, or do other things. You can see an energy gauge that includes lighting, and touch that to go to a lighting page to make changes, for example.

Energy Automation for All Budgets

Systems from Savant, Elan Crestron, Vantage, Control4 and others can even be programmed to turn off or turn down devices if preset energy use ceilings are reached;though this will likely require programming costs.

Even lower-end systems being sold by the likes of ADT, Comcast, Verizon, Vivint and Alarm.com, can be programmed with basic macros and timed events to turn things off when someone leaves the house and the security system is armed, for instance.

Whether you opt for high-end or less expensive systems, this is the kind of automation that’s really required for us to have true energy efficiency and energy management in our homes. And the need will become even greater as smart grid services from electric utilities roll out with variable rate structures like Time of Use, in which the electric rates change throughout the day depending on demand. With a smart meter and smart appliance, you’ll be able to delay a dishwashing cycle to a cheaper time. You can do the same with charging an electric vehicle, and maybe even use the energy stored in the vehicle’s batteries to power your house or help power the grid (called V2G). But what about having a real, smart energy management system that knows your needs and habits and can save you energy, or repurpose it—without you using all of your energy to do so? (Which we know we won’t.)

This is why automation is so critical to having effective energy management in our homes. We need it to automate those tasks, to work to save us energy behind the scenes and only alert us with texts, emails or Tweets when we need to be.

Need ROI?

Higher-end automation systems may only pay a return on investment in large homes that use a lot of energy. Then again, whoever bought a big home automation system expecting a return on investment? Now we’re going to expect that to save some energy?

You can always start small, with Z-Wave-based do-it-yourself or systems from the big service providers, which also use Z-Wave. And build up, or even get starter home control packages from professionally installers for a room or two for under $1,000 and build from there. Other mid-priced and more affordable energy management systems are also becoming available.

We’re all learning to appreciate energy efficiency more and the need to curb our energy use as much as possible—but as the Shelton Group’s findings show, we can use help from technology to do so. In fact, we could use as much help as we can get.

Read more about systems for home energy monitoring here.