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Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

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Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#41

Post by bcrosby95 »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #31
bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people have gotten lazy about turning off lights since LED is so cheap. E.g. I think our kitchen light is on around 12 hours per day because the switch isn't very convenient. Or the garage light - if it's left on during the day, it probably won't be noticed until morning. Also kids tend not to turn lights off. But yeah, even if you are saving money, smart switches are pretty expensive. It will take a while to…

> Also kids tend not to turn lights off. Teach your kids ? What is this laziness of saying "kids won't do X" ?

Its called reality. Kids are people, not machines. Parenting is more comparable to pushing on a string than writing a program.

I've seen some people spend 17 years (and counting) trying to teach their kids to turn off the lights.

Much less your average 5 year old, most of which probably lack the mental awareness to always remember to turn off the light when they leave a room. Hell, my 5 year old almost ran barefoot over shattered glass because she really wanted to throw something in the trash - she forgot the glass was there about 10 seconds after we told her not to come over here while I cleaned it up.

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#42

Post by rconti »

Side note: Has Disqus ever worked, for anyone?

I've tried dozens of times over the past few years. It never provides a 'logged in' comment box. Once I login, if i try to login again, it complains about a form submission error. I've never bothered to troubleshoot because mostly I want to avoid using Disqus but a couple times a year I decide to give it a go, and.. nothing. I have or had an account, which doesn't seem to work. I've also tried to use Twitter integration, which seems the least-bad (because my twitter account is rarely used for anything anyway).

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#43

Post by azdle »

peckrob wrote: post #27

My utility also installed smart meters recently - the Focus AXRe with Gridstream RF. It theoretically has Zigbee in it. It even has the Zigbee logo on it. I haven't figured out if I can read it yet, but in fairness I also haven't put a lot of work into figuring it out either. At the very least I could not get Smartthings to see it. So if anybody knows anything more about this meter I would love to know. :) But I DID…

I couldn't find anything called a "Focus AXRe", looking at a few different products that came up for "Gridstream RF" the compliance docs only list that they're zigbee coordinators, not endpoint devices. ex: https://zigbeealliance.org/zigbee_products/gridstream-rf-enh... see 8.1 on pg 7. AFAIU, that means it expects to control other zigbee devices, not report to coordinators like the ST hub.

You could see if you can find your actual meter here: https://zigbeealliance.org/zigbee_products/?product_type=cer...

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#44

Post by gulfie »

https://permies.com/w/better-world : this covers this exact topic... in several different ways.

Most of the electricity being used in the Wisconsin winter is going to be for heating. The best dollar ROI is typically weather stripping and insulating followed by using a heat pump ( preferably ground looped ), and of course the best choice might just be a rocket mass heater.

For passive solar options : https://www.builditsolar.com/

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#45

Post by reificator »

rconti wrote: post #42

Side note: Has Disqus ever worked, for anyone? I've tried dozens of times over the past few years. It never provides a 'logged in' comment box. Once I login, if i try to login again, it complains about a form submission error. I've never bothered to troubleshoot because mostly I want to avoid using Disqus but a couple times a year I decide to give it a go, and.. nothing. I have or had an account, which doesn't seem t…

Sounds like an adblocker or something blocking a resource that Disqus "requires" in order to function.

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#46

Post by bsza »

Someone wrote: post #3

I never understood the claim that smart switches on LED lightbulbs will conserve energy. The duty cycle of the average light bulb is fairly low; I would guess they are switched on for If so, adding a ‘smart switch’ that uses 0.5W to a lighting fixture that has a 10W LED light bulb increases its average power usage by about 50%. You must be fairly sloppy to make that a gain, compared to a manually operated switch.

One thing I noticed since installing smart bulbs all around my house is how little light I actually need most of the time. In the evenings I usually run them at 5% brightness. Don't know how that scales consumption-wise though.

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#47

Post by MayeulC »

Incidentally, I was wondering how a "smart" home could centralize power distribution to use less energy.

Yes, the hub would be always on, but you get to kill every sleeping device, such as the TV, "smart" lightbulbs by making the hub control them directly, phone chargers and various transformers plugged in the outlet, idling computers, etc.

Just ask the hub to turn on your computer, for instance.

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#48

Post by zamalek »

The real usage is DNS. I set up a PiHole last week and... Wow. 70% of requests are my fiance's echos (my Google devices, which I am trying to convince her with, are below the noise floor, go figure).

The privacy concerns are real, but I actually use smart assistants a good deal of time when I am at home.

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#49

Post by filoleg »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #28
filoleg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal guess would be that the settings are stored either on the Hue hub or within the app you use to connect to it. Mostly because, I've noticed, after someone turns off my Hue bulbs by accident by flipping the switch and then turns them on, they don't get restored to the same scene setting as they were before. I have to manually change back to the scene it was on before being powered off. On another hand, afte…

That changed with updated bulb firmware. Initially bulbs would reset to their default state on power on, but they're now able to save state. The way I read it this behavior is not dependent upon the hub or app. The Phillips app is so junky I just use the hard power switches somewhat frequently. https://huehomelighting.com/new-power-feature-to-retain-colo...

Luckily, their protocol is interoperable, so I don't think you are required to use their app, even for their initial setup (not 100% sure on the last part, but I am about 90% there).

Their lights work great with HomeKit, as well as many other devices do. So instead of having a separate app for Kasa switches, app for Hue, app for LiFX, and an app for Nanoleaf, I can control them all straight from HomeKit. Considering that this is easily doable, it seems totally possible to do this with something other than just HomeKit as well.

Re: Thinking About Smart Home Power Usage

#50

Post by function_seven »

Relys wrote: post #38
function_seven wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and "anything that generates heat" would contribute significantly to reductions. I never measured it, but there was one area that I quickly put a Tasmota plug on. My stereo receiver under the TV. One day I was putting around the den and I noticed a lot of heat emanating from the credenza under the TV. It was my Sony receiver just sitting there, dutifully amplifying the null input from the turned-off TV. So I ad…

Home Assistant is great! I flashed a cheap ES8266 RGB Led controller with ESPruna firmware and hooked it up to HA over MQTT. What are some of your hardware recommendations? I also have a Zigbee/Z-Wave dongle for the RPi, so I'm not limited to WiFi only.

I use a Conbee II dongle with deCONZ for all my Zigbee stuff, and try to use Zigbee wherever possible.

The Hue bulbs are great, and also act as repeaters, so I have those sprinkled throughout the house. But they're expensive, so I used Sengled bulbs for most of my fixtures. The Sengleds are endpoint-only, though. So I mix those two bulbs to keep the mesh dense but also save some money.

All my door sensors are the SmartThings units. I use a mix of SmartThings and IKEA Trådfri motion sensors. One SmartThings water leak detector in the basement, a SmartThings button, and a Trådfri 5-button remote.

I started this just to have a convenient way to control lights. My house is really old, and almost all lighting is table- and floor-lamps that I would have to walk around and turn on and off. Or ceiling lamps with pull cords.

But after getting into Home Assistant, I started going a little nuts with the automations.

My favorite one: A month ago I was getting ready for bed when I realized I left my oven on all day long. For 12 hours it was keeping the oven at 375˚F. But then I realized that I already have a motion sensor in the kitchen, and if I just moved it to the door of the oven, the built-in temperature sensor could be used to remind me that the oven was left on. So now I have a rule in my automations.yaml: If the kitchen temperature exceeds the living room temperature by more than 10˚F for more than an hour, send a notification to my phone that I left the oven on.

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