Automating Homes Into Green Buildings

The average residential home wastes a ton of energy, that much is already known. Common fiberglass insulation is barely adequate, especially in Canada and northern tier US states, most windows and doors have leaky seams and edges, and most homes are fully heated (and sometimes lit!) even when no one is home. Part of that is due to building codes that are, frankly, decades out of date, not to mention the vast bulk of homes built long before energy conservation was really a concern.Usage itself has been a tough question to approach with the public. Prior to the coming of the simplest programmable thermostats, no one would have been willing to, say, keep their house at 50F through out the day and have to wait in the cold for the furnace to make up the difference after they got home and reset things.Programmable thermostats themselves helped to some degree; if you could predict when you would be home and away, for instance, you could program the thermostat to take the temp down during the day, then kick it back up (or the reverse for central air conditioning) before you’re scheduled to get home. And as it stands, there’s tax breaks for programmable thermostats, and they’ve been shown to save considerable money over a year of use.Smart homes are the next step forward.Imagine, for instance, that the house could determine occupancy of each room and adjust lighting and heat accordingly. No need to touch the thermostat, or try to remember on what days you’ll be home when. Many folks have unpredictable schedules these days, or at least ones that change often; reprogramming a thermostat weekly to reflect upcoming activities would be onerous and unlikely to be used. Likewise, if you want to sleep with the temps low, since you’ll be snuggled under the blankets, but have a toddler who is prone to kick the covers off in the night, you may want to set each room up differently.The best news, of course, is that most of this kind of thing is already possible. For now it’s been reserved to those who can afford expensive installation of sensors and monitors and suchlike, but as with most technologies, the cost is coming down rapidly and it could be less than a decade before most or all new homes are built with such systems in place. Programmable thermostats already come standard, so it’s not a stretch to think that full-home systems may not be far off.

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