Do Smart Home technologies help to fight global warming?

With proper design, programming and installation Smart Home technologies can have a tremendous impact on energy consumption and reduce amount of energy that need to be dissipated from the surface of the planet. We’ll just take an example of the home heating.

Typical bedroom in the house with central HVAC without any Smart Home addition would have only one method control heating locally – vent where warm air is coming into the room. When we look at Smart Home connected option the full set is of sensors and controls is:

• Smart Thermostat
• Smart Vent with air flow control/air booster
• Temperature sensor
• Occupancy sensor
• Bed/mattress pressure sensor (may be eliminated with proper selection and placement of occupancy sensors)

With those inputs Smart Home controller can use vent to increase, reduce or shut off flow of the air from furnace to particular room and create a very well controlled HVAC zone. On average 3 bedroom home is around1300 square feet with bedroom of 132 square feet. That gives about 60% of the area does not need to be heated up to a human comfortable temperature, it can safely be 5 degrees lower or even more in most cases. Using very simplified formula (desired temperature change)x(cubic feet of space)x.133 and assuming 40 degrees outside, 8 feet ceiling and 68 degrees human comfortable temperature we get

Heating whole house to the same temperature requires 38729 BTU

With 40/60 split and 5 degrees difference 35920 BTU

That gives 7.2% savings with this simple scenario. With 10 degrees difference energy requirements drop by 24%.

As we can see Smart Home technologies can significantly reduce gas/oil burning requirements for heating and contribute to reduce acceleration of global warming.