Six Tips for Making Your House an Energy-Saving Smart Home
There is a growing popularity among smart home. For one, it helps modernize a space. Second, it ensures that you are smart with energy consumption.
This means that a smart home allows you to save money on your electricity and water bills.
Before we move on to these energy-saving tips for smart homes, let’s first define what a smart home is.
What is a Smart Home?
If you don’t know what a smart home is, it’s essentially a home with appliances and devices that you can access remotely. Imagine being able to turn the lights on and off in your house while you are in another country.
Given these technological advancements, you might expect that these appliances will consume a lot of energy. Thus, you must apply these six energy-saving tips for your smart home.
1. Use smart power strips
When you have a limited number of outlets and many electronic devices, you fall and rely on power strips.
Power strips allow you the chance to use more devices that need electricity even if you have one outlet. However, when you leave appliances plugged in, even when they’re not in use, the devices will still use up electricity.
That’s why you need to make sure that you unplug the devices when they’re not in use, even if they’re plugged into a power strip. However, sometimes, you’re too lazy, or it’s too much of a hassle to continually plug and unplug specific devices plugged into your power strip.
To help you with that, you can replace your traditional power strips with smart power strips instead. Smart power strips can detect when your electronic devices are on standby instead of in use, so it will turn on and off based on that.
2. Enable automatic power-downs
Speaking of electronic devices in stand by, many significant appliances are still consuming energy even when not in use.
These significant appliances might be harder to plug or unplug if the wires or plug is someplace hidden or hard to reach. That said, consider looking for devices that have power-down modes.
However, what you might not know is that these devices have automatic power-down modes. Putting your device in automatic power-down mode will prevent appliances on standby from consuming energy unnecessarily.
You can reduce a lot of energy consumption by turning on this mode for appliances. This includes your heater, air conditioner, cooking appliances, your lighting, and your washers or dryers.
3. Invest in solar panels
If you’re going to invest in any devices for your smart home, it should be solar panels. Solar panels need to be a more widespread thing, but it might not be because it will cause the electricity industry’s close down.
If you have the money, invest in solar panels when you can. It’s certainly a costly upfront cost, which is why it’s difficult for a lot of people to have them. However, the long-term savings you’re going to get will be so worth it in the long run.
Aside from generating your electricity instead of relying a lot on your energy provider, you can even earn money from it. If you create more energy than you use, your energy provider can pay for the energy you generated.
4. Manage devices remotely
One of the best ways to save energy for your smart home is by implementing more remote device operations in your house.
How many times have you left your house, and once you’re far away from it, you start wondering whether you’ve turned off the oven? If you’ve left the air conditioner on when you were out? If you still left the TV plugged in or turned on when you left?
When your home devices can connect remotely, it’s a lot easier to turn your devices on and off when you forget to turn them off. You can turn off your TV, oven, and everything when you want to, even when you’re not at home.
Even in terms of your home security system components, you can also find security systems that you can operate remotely. If you’re out of the house and want to look at what your surveillance system is capturing, there are technological advances that will help you get real-time surveillance.
5. Install sensor-controlled lights
Your lights also consume a lot of energy if you leave them unattended. That’s why you need to make sure that you are turning them off when you leave the room.
With that said, if you want to live in a smart home, it makes sense that you also optimize the lights in your home. One way to do that is by installing sensor-controlled lights.
Sensor-controlled lights turn on and off depending on whether it detects movement in the room or not. They work best for the lights that you put up outside of your home.
Aside from being energy-efficient, you can also use these sensor-controlled lights as an additional security measure. Since it detects movement, if someone is too close for comfort, the sudden light shining on them should alarm them, and it might deter them from pursuing your house.
6. Purchase smart appliances
A smart home can’t be a smart home without having any smart appliances.
Smart appliances all have a setting that allows them to be more energy-efficient. A lot of them are appliances that you can operate remotely as well. Thus, you’ll be able to turn them on and off whenever and wherever you want.
Although there are energy-efficient smart appliances, it doesn’t mean they don’t consume energy. That’s why you have to make sure that you look into whether the smart machine you’re using is energy-efficient.
Otherwise, you might still be using the same amount of energy or even more than a traditional appliance.
The smart home energy-saving tips listed above can help you get a technologically-advanced home without a hefty energy bill. If you plan on upgrading to a smart home, make sure that you keep these tips in mind. That way, your transition towards a smart home will be smoother and less straining for the wallet.
