What's Your Strategy For Cutting Home Energy Usage?
May 19, 2009

Many folks view home automation as a discretionary expense, and limit their foray into home controls to adding a universal remote to the Entertainment Center.

However, if you're in the middle of developing a serious plan to reduce your home energy consumption, your Entertainment Center can not be ignored. For a typical home, lighting consumes 12 percent of the electrical bill. Another 11 percent of the electrical cost is attributable to the HVAC system. And the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) believes home electronic devices already account for 15 percent of household electric consumption.

Considering a flat-screen TV uses 120 watts of power when turned on and 40 watts when off. A DVD player uses up to 25 watts of power. And an audio system can draw up to 400 watts of power. It's not hard to see how all these electronic devices can add up to 15% or more depending on your usage.

But what should be more worrisome for the energy conscious is the IEA estimates that new electronic gadgets, including flat-panel TVs, will triple their energy consumption by 2030 to 1,700 terawatt hours. This increase is equivalent of today's home electricity consumption of the United States and Japan combined. Furthermore the IEA said the world would have to build around 200 new nuclear power plants just to power all the TVs, iPods, PCs and other home electronics expected to be plugged in by 2030, when the global electric bill to power them will rise to $200 billion a year!

There are relatively inexpensive devices available today allowing you to measure the total electrical usage in your home and individual plugged-in device or appliance usage (see www.jclautomation.com/green_home.asp). Knowing the top electrical consuming units in your home allows you to take steps to reduce your bill by manually cutting usage at times the device is not really needed.

However, once sensors can supply electrical usage data per device to a whole-house automation system, offending devices can be turned off if a usage threshold is exceeded. For example, it should be okay to turned off your refrigerator for 90 minutes in the middle of the night without jeopardizing your food.

A recent CEPro article describes such a system from Agilewaves Inc. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company has announced native integration of its Resource Monitor product with a Crestron control system. The Resource Monitor measures electrical usage simply using a two-wire toroidal ring sensor that simply clips on a circuit wire. If programmed energy thresholds have been exceeded the Resource Monitor triggers an event to the Crestron System that turns off devices on the offending circuit. Thus automating the manual steps you might take to cut electrical usage.