subject: The Potential Of Smart Home And How They Should Function In Practice [print this page] The Potential Of Smart Home And How They Should Function In Practice
In the 90's, I designed a Domotics Controller when I used to be Managing Director of a electronics high tech company and wished to amaze our clientele. My team and I designed a PLC (programmable logic controller) based system, which switched the lights and air conditioning actuators on and off depending on the presence of persons in each office. In the night the same system acted as an advanced burglar alarm system that either activated a bell, alerted an alarm service, called phones or any combination alerting when a burglar tried to break in the building.But our bookkeeper reported later what actually was a big revelation: Our company had energy savings of up to 35%. How to explain this? In both a residential and commercial environment, people tend to forget turning off the lights when they go out, let alone adjust the thermostat.Home Automation is nice but a critical factor is the procedure and how exactly to deal with the exception. Here I present them and exceptions in a simplified fashion:Please appreciate that the situations described are for domotics. But it is not hard to understand how it would work at an office.Living roomWhen the motion sensors see presence in the living room the settings defined by the user for presence mode shall apply for lighting and temperature. When there is no presence detected in the living room the lights are automatically switched off after a designated delay. When the absence continues in the living room the Energy Conservation Controller will change the temperature in the living. When persons are detected in the room the system will activate lighting right away and when presence is detected for a longer period the Energy Conservation Controller will switch on the air conditioning.The bed roomsMost domotics designers tend to forget about the significant social function of a bed room. User control is of significant importance in this case. Domotics systems should have the ability to let the homeowner control the way to handle the deviations to the standard rules in a very user friendly way. A properly designed domotic system will allow the user to manually override the automatic settings. The above examples are just to showcase the importance of a sound home automation approach. Considering the energy savings it can be expected that domotics systems are going to play a major role in the near future.Home automation systems are definitely marching up! And high technology marketing will make them more popular eventually. Residential renewable energy solutions and home energy conservation systems are shown in the GE ECOmagination challenge that ended March 15, 2011. However, the competition website is still online. (Google: Ecomagination Energy Conservation) -do not click the advertisement at the top. If you are interested in energy conservation it is worth while to take a look as there are many innovative ideas presented.
