5 Simple Tips to Save Energy and Costs Every Day

Energy prices are going through the roof these days. I heard from some people that they have to pay 900 euros per month for gas and electricity these days. Luckily we have Home Assistant that can help us lower our energy costs by creating smart automations. I will show you five ways to save energy costs in this Home Assistant Tutorial! Home Assistant to the rescue!

Links referred to in this video:

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:04 Energy Saving Tip 1: Turn the heating off automatically if a Window is Open
00:03:53 Energy Saving Tip 2: Do not turn on Lights if Lux is higher than a certain value
00:06:22 Energy Saving Tip 3: Turn the heating and lights off automatically when everybody left the house
00:10:39 Energy Saving Tip 4: If the temperature outside is warmer than inside, turn off the heating and send a message
00:15:22 Energy Saving Tip 5: If Solar Panels generate more than x Watt, then turn on appliances

#homeassistant #saveenergy #energy #saveenergywithhomeassistant #energycosts #saveenergycosts #smarthome #homeautomation

[SmartHomeJunkie]

What clever automations did you create to save energy and costs in Home Assistant? Let me know in the comments below!

[EdwinPWeston]

Nice! I have been a Junkie since the X-10 days. Not sure how much energy this saves but... my favorite HA automation is a voice command/button to turn on the hot water recirculator pump (it circulates the cold water in the hot water lines back into the water heater). After 4 minutes, Alexa announces "Hot Water Is Ready" This avoids unnecessarily running water down the drain until it's hot, and living in Nevada, this also saves precious resources. The pump, which was plumbed into out new house 20 years ago, was originally on a mechanical timer to run in the morning and evening, but no-one in this house uses hot water the same time every day. Some day I should compute how much time we saved not running the pump unnecessarily.

[nigelholland]

Another great video. Was trying your first tip only yesterday and struggling. Thank you again.

[KaleoMgmt]

We try to use ceiling fans and windows before using the A/C to save energy. We live in Southern California, so heat is a bigger concern than cold.

I use my Thermostat temp to turn On/Off ceiling fans.

I use the hourly forecast to turn our attic fan On/Off. At 2030, if the attic fan is still on, it's automatically turned off.

We also have Door/Window sensors throughout the house. If the A/C is on, and a Door or Window is opened for over 30sec three things happen:

1) An actionable notification is sent out to the phones (thanks for that tutorial!!). It tells us what is open and gives us an option to turn the A/C off.
2) Notifications are sent out over the Alexa devices so someone can walk over to close the door/window.
3) A 5min timer begins. After the timer ends, if the conditions haven't changed, another message is sent out.

Thanks for the ongoing ideas and instruction!!

[RobvanKoningsbruggen]

I use some of your tips already. Here in Norway we have all electric heating units or heat-pumps to heat the house.
I have different temp set points for the heaters for when at home or away, i use a zone for the village i live in, so that when i do the grocery shopping the heating stays on, but when i leave the village the heaters go to away mode.

For the heater in the entrance hallway i check if the doors (front door / kitchen door) are closed then the turn heater on when the room temp is below set point

The heater in the bathroom only turns on when the bathroom door is closed and the temp in the bathroom is below the set point, or when i want to take a shower i flip a helper on and the heater goes to higher set point. The helper is turned off when i open the bathroom door for 2 min. and the heater stops.

The living room and bedroom are heated by the heat-pump and depending on the outside temperature the heat-pump is turned on and the temp of the heat-pump is set.
When i am away the heat-pump is off or on 16c (lowest setting). when i leave work for home (30 min drive) the heat-pump turns on and set to the normal temperature.
One hour before my bedtime the head-pump turns off or goes to the low setting depending on outside temp.

The last big user is my cooking stove. I can not turn it on or off but i watch the power usage. When i eg. want to put a pizza in the oven i turn the oven on and watch the power usage,
if it drops the oven is at the right temp and and i get an announcement that the oven is ready. When the timer in (HA) for the oven is done i get an other announcement.
At that time a new time 5 min. starts so i don't forget to turn the oven off, if the power goes to zero no announcement otherwise a reminder interrupts my diner.

If the temp sensor in at the entrance or the bathroom drop from the network the heaters turn on and use their build in thermostat and a notification is send to my mobile

I can sometimes be a couple of days away from home so i have to incorporate fail safes for if a sensor or even HA is acting up.
It can get pretty cold here in the winter, but the advantage is that i have some ski slopes at a 30 min. drive from home.

[riesmoos]

Tip #6: Watch your Smart Home Junkie videos on your puny smartphone/tablet instead of using your main desktop PC with a big fat graphics card and a 3 monitor setup.
My HA is triggered when the audio amplifier of the PC is turned ON while no motion is being detected at/near the PC for 15 minutes, cause then I'm probably sitting on my ass watching videos.
HA will notify me on my smartphone and tablets that it is better to consume that media via smartphone or tablet.
I measured power consumption of my PC's a while back. The one I use the most is pulling 210Watts just at idle.
Thanks for the upload Ed !

[emms-place]

Another great video. Thanks.

I changed the majority of my lights to set the brightness to 75%. Most lights there is hardly a difference in brightness between 75 and 100. I setup a numeric helper to store this value. So any changes require only one change.

[Gladers.]

Nordpool has its own HACS-Integration that allows you to sync your current energy use with the current hourly electricity cost.
I'm trying out 3 smart tools to give you a status of how the current hourly price is compared to the whole day. That way you can direct for example heating when that sensor show "true" meaning the current hourly price is one of 5 cheapest hours today.

[Eric_Tennant]

I may do a Arizona version of this video; however I added solar to negative my power bill using HA to play the peak game.

[christian]

Thanks for the video !
I also have solar panels, but... I can read my digital counter, where I see if I send power back to the grid (so generated power is higher than consumed power). If you can do this too, then it is better to base your automation on this.
Another automation to save some electricity : when the shutters go up in the morning, the lights go out.

[TheMennoM]

Nice video.

I use the weather forecast to check if the sun will shine the next X hours. When above a threshold. HA will not turn on the heating.

You can receive data locally from you SolarEdge inverter via the modbus. There is an integration for that in hacs.

[bat]

one day i will have my house and implement all of these . when you are in rentals the scope automation are limited to the portability of the project that can be shifted to next rental

[sevagjb]

nice Ed, I'm planning to add solar panel to my house but not yet, soon
And I'm using HA to control all my appliances direct (built in) or smart plug (with watt monitoring) very useful ideas 👌

[jaap]

Dynamic (hourly) prices are very interesting at the moment. You pay the actual price for energy. Shifting just a bit of load (using HA automations) can save hundreds of euros per year (Or thousands of euros when you have an EV)

[RikardKjell]

Great inspiration for energy savings. The one thing that consumes power (non-stop earlier) in my humble appartment was after some analyzing (quite obvious for me in retrospect) the ventilation unit. This is a "dumb" unit that is always on. To make it somewhat smarter or at least being able to control it, I bought a smart-plug for it and made automations to turn it off most of the time when nobody is at home. Only with a shorter ventilation cycle every hour or half an hour. When no "biological" activity is present at home the need for ventilation is minimal.

[danielwedekind]

great video, thank you. I still have a question about tip 3: when I'm back home and switch the heating on with "all", what value does it have? a fixed value, or the value before switching off?

[christian]

Addition to your 3rd tip: don't forget TV / hi-fi.

Another of my last energy saving automations was the bathroom heating. The electric blower stayed on regularly when leaving the bathroom... now it turns off as soon as there is no movement for a while. The possibility to obtain a basic temperature in the bathroom (during off-peak hours) is also provided (interesting if you have to enter the bathroom shortly afterwards).

[boorandras]

The 3rd tip is exactly contra-productive:
The best cost-efficent way of heating a house or a building is: Keep constant temperature! Do NOT let the rooms cooling down when nobody are there if it should be warm again in the next few hours (or days)..
I tested it out:
We have a relatively well insulated family house (no common walls with our neighbours, where we could enjoy the thermal leakage of somebody else's heating or anything like this).
I decreased the target temperature with 1.5°C (for 22°C) when we left the house for a weekend travel, around ~ 1 PM on friday, and we arrived home about 7pm on sunday.
I used homeassistant to increase target temperature back for 23, 5°C on 1pm on sunday, before we arrive home, to ensure, the temperature will be the usual when we arrive home.
For us, this weekend (~53 hours) generates more heating cost than the next 3 days when the target temperature of our heating was 23, 5°C constantly.
(The exterior temperature was about the same (on that weekend and after that weekend too).
Since I have all the neccessary hardware to control the temperature room-by-room, with using HomeAssistant, thereby I'm able to schedule targerTemperature changes, etc,
but unfortunatelly it seems the best cost effective way of heating is keeping the necessary temperature even if nobody is in that room for hours or maybe days too..

It is sad for us, who built a system to be able to control the heating system based on schedule, or based on room-occupancy, but is seems the thermodinamical rules aren't with us..
I would love if I could save a bit from the heating costs with some clever automations, or heating schedule, but we can't..

Yet the open-windows -based heating contol (turning off the heating when any window on that room is opened, seems useful only if the open window -period is a longer time period (more than 5-10-15 minutes).

[joenie]

Older pumps for underfloor heating can use a lot of energy. So I created an automation that turns off the pump when the heating is off and turns the pump back on when the heating is on.

[joeconstable]

Thanks for another great video! In the case of your lights, do you have any ideas for how to deal with the following situation? Say for example that you turn the light on by accident (maybe your voice assistant misheard or you did it on the app in your pocket), normally when the motion stops being detected the light will turn off. However, if motion wasn't detected when the light turned on, the light will stay on until the next time the sensor registers motion, and then only when the sensor becomes clear will the light turn off. Best way to deal with this?