Smart Home Energy Optimization

I use my smart home to manage my energy usage to be as efficient as possible.

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[BrandonDoyleMN]

When we first built our home I went through this exercise and had it all dialed in nicely but then we purchased a hot tub, and that offset all my efforts and more. Turning off computers has a big impact

[Humphrey]

More like this please!! I've found new parts of HA from this video. I've pulled up six months of energy logging on my house, that i didn't know about, and have a very good idea where all my power is being used. I had not been tracking the power on my Shelly controlled lights (turned that on today) and will get some smart controllers on the Sonos speakers when i get home.
I may be late to the party here but why do you need to have the towel rails on a schedule at all? You need to heat the towels when you shower and for a finite amount of time after that. How long does it take to heat the towels from a standing start? Use a humidity sensor to identify that someone is using the shower to trigger the towel rail. My towel rail is at temperature well within the time i can be in the shower. You then need a helper to control how long it stays on after that. Same deal for the guest bathroom, or when you're on holidays, or choose to be stinky and go to bed untubbed. Why turn the towel rail on unless you KNOW someone is ging to need a heated towel.
One thing I've learned from years of industrial experience is to measure the thing you're trying to see, and not try to predict it.

[Weeem]

Nice.
One thing I noticed from monitoring home device usage over the years with Home Assistant (and HACS Powercalc) was how little energy LED bulbs require vs output.
Even though my parents homes don't have home automation, during the price hike in energy costs a couple of years ago I got them to make an inventory of their bulbs and I replaced them all with LED equivalents. I took on the upfront cost, but the long term saving for them has been huge (esp replacing halogen bulbs).

My own home is pretty efficient and, like yours, it uses automations combined + zigbee buttons so nothing stays on standby, but there was still one big power leach that niggled away at my brain.
My main "big" PC, which has an Nvidia GPU for both home work and play is something I use a lot for both remote working and play at night. I justified the cost as it's a tool I use a lot, so why not. On idle it consumes 250+w and when gaming it easily ramps up to 450W+. In the end the "this could be done better" won the fight in my head.

We have a headless Lenovo Tiny PC that's used as a low power remote access for when we're away (and to manage some security cameras). So instead of that coming on when not_home, I hooked it up to my monitor and started instead to use it as my daily driver and now only using the big PC in the evening when gaming or for other stuff that properly makes use of the GPU. This one thing is saving us at least £250/yr
I bought it years ago from eBay, but if I was to get it again today, it would've paid for itself within 4 months.

[KenGuest_IE]

I see what you did there with your comment about your fridge/freezer power monitoring.
Very cool!

[PaulStuttard]

Great video, that base load is a killer! Did a similar survey for our house, and frustrated to discover there was no one big 'thing' that I could turn off over night to save some power. I think the best candidate was the TV antenna booster, but even that was less than 10W.

The feedback on the energy usage is an absolute brilliant idea, getting 'buy in' from everyone in the house is key to energy saving, keeping it simple Green - good, Red - Bad, also great. I had an old Squeezebox music player with a nice bright VFD display showing the energy generated / imported, which worked really well. However my family did struggle with the scale of the numbers, like "look wow we are generating 300 units, best put the washing on".

I'd be wary of that switch, the relay may be shot and not closing properly, drawing 3KW across it in that state could cause a fire. One of my biggest concerns with getting smart switches off Amazon that are not quite as good as advertised.

[gerryf]

Nice and some good ideas. Towel warmers are really a first world problem!!! "When I saw young ..." :) Dry yourself in the shower enclosure. The perception of heat stays for a while after you turn off the hot water. Stepping out of the shower gives you an immediate sharp temperature change! Give it a try.

[briankloc]

Put the towel racks on a humidity sensor. Once it goes past a certain humidity level, turn on the towel rack for an hour.

[RobertoBristo]

I‘m eager diving into the topic of energy optimisation, as we bought an old shed as well recently.

[fearthesmeag]

Excellent video Alan. I do like the LED changing color - based on status of the Solar/Grid energy. Which we just had installed last week. Nice to have you back again!

[LocalBytes]

Fantastic to see such an in-depth dive into truly understanding your energy usage.
Top notch video!

[RLRTT]

Request for video on how to set up guest and holiday switches for Home Assistant. - Awesome to see your videos returning

[rpinut]

500W idle for the house is a lot of power. I currently have a idle load of the house of around 119W with 1 of the biggest power draw of 40W comes from the Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro SE with 2 Wifi 6 pro accesspoints. An other high load is the ventilation heatpump for hot water and heat at idle with a power draw of 33W. My server just consumed around 11W at idle, but I do not have a local file store on it. Hope you can figure out to draw less power.

[Davidmc]

The reason the dishwasher stopped working with the smart plug is probably the smart plugs power got real dirty and dirty power is a thing that creates unusual stuff like that.

Dishwashers are hard on power with the booster heating and the way it switches. One in the same circuit as a standard refrigerator wreaks havoc on it, that happened to me when some restoration guys were stupid. I've seen "perfectly good" power supplies mess with computer motherboards in ways that make no sense.

Thanks for the video you gave me a solution to a problem I have.

[dorinic]

I've used Tapo p110 WiFi smart plugs with energy monitoring to smarten up my dishwasher.

I have Home Assistant switch the plug on when the night rate electricity starts at 2am. So I just have to start a wash and then tell Alexa to turn off the plug a few seconds in. Then at 2am the wash will properly start when the plug is turned back on. Very basic but very useful.

I also use Home Assistant with the power monitoring of the plug to announce that the dishwasher is finished so someone can unload it. Not very useful at 4am, but it is great when doing ad-hoc washes during the day or evening.

[PatrickFelstead]

great video! My guess with the dishwasher is that a capacitor in the smart switch is degrading over time, causing increased EMI emissions that (to your point) interfere with the dishwaser electronics. To test the theory, try powering the dishwasher using an extension lead from a power outlet a few metres away, and put the smart plug on the outlet. Not a permanent solution, but might point to what the problem is.

[desertaip]

Our towel warmer is linked to the shower light and fan. It does turn on on a timer prior to shower time. But it only turns on for the extended period after a shower to dry the towels if the shower light and fan were both turned on for more than 2 minutes, and then the light is turned off. The fan is on an hour timer after this sequence and so is the towel warmer.

[skaapvisagie]

Regarding your dishwasher; My best guess is that the switch mode power supply in your smart plug is radiating conducted immersions in to the AC line at some hormonic of SMPS. This is in turn affects the control circuit of your dishwasher because the VCC filter of the control card does not filter it out and creates noise in the control electronic circuit.

I would try another smart plug ( different brand) That might have less or different frequency conducted immersion.

Well that is just my guess

[darknessblades]

What I do for my lights since I live on my own is have 1 master switch function, that turns off ANY lights that are on in the rest of the house if I turn the bedroom light OFF, from my bed.

This saves the headache of finding a light still ON, when I come back later [only 2 exceptions are the smart light switches that are connected to a light with build in motion sensor [toilet/hallway]]

For heating I have it set so that I don't use the climate panel buttons but my own to turn on the HEAT. I use custom buttons that are connected to a automation I can disable/enable trough a childlock.
it can also only run during the winter. to prevent accidentally turning it on in the dead of summer finding your house at a TOASTY 50C. and the heater running at FULL power.

Still optimizing a few things more like smart blinds to prevent draft from the windows.

[JaneTaubman]

Thanks for the suggestions. I have implemented most of them. As an aside I notice you have Heatmisser. We have an 8 zone gas powered variant. There are a couple of things I have done to optimise gas usage when we are away. First I have changed the Away temp in the zones to 7c. There is a bug in the android app, so you need to get them to do it or use a different app. Additionally I have removed all scheduling from Heatmisser and moved it in to Home assistant using a combination of a calendar with repeating events and some automations to change the target temps. It works really well and means HA can tightly control the house heating, especially when we are away. Out of interest my home base level is 4Kwh per day for electricity. This covers our internet, home assistant server and smart plugs, switches.

[MarkLemanUK]

Some humidity sensors in the bathrooms would help with the control of the towel rails. I am thinking of adding some to my HA install to help refine the control of our MVHR system