Smart home is not just about making your home smart or automating stuff, it’s also about energy savings. Saving energy here and there has an impact on a few things including your bill and also on the PLANET. I won’t go into details on why we need to save energy or how does it matter to the planet as we all should very well know that!

The idea of having a smart home is to help us with daily stuffs and automation. That very concept is a first step in saving energy. The cost of electricity in Mauritius is kind of average but it may go up soon. Rumors are there!

IFTTT has a challenge called #EnergyChallenge which basically looks at connecting smart devices to save energy, money and the environment. There are numerous ways to save energy with smart home and I will try to list some of them and provide an example of how to automate it.

Lights Only when you need them!

This one is basic enough and the title says it all. Turn on light only when it is needed. Let’s take an example of a garage, most of us will turn the garage on at dusk and then turn it off when we are back home or when we remember it.

How can we automate this?

An automation that turns on the light at dusk and then turns it off at a certain time. This can be achieved easily with a Sonoff Basic device. However, we can go the extra mile and use geo fencing. This automation will turn on the lights when you are approaching your home and you can set it to turn off after 10 minutes. You won’t be needing lights for longer than that if you’re only parking your car in the garage. Below is an example of an automation using home assistant which will turn on the garage light for 10 minutes between 17:55 and 05:00 the next day when it sees my phone approach my house.

We have gone down from using 7+ hours of energy per week to 70 minutes of energy per week.

There are other ways of achieving this using smart home tech like motion sensors which will trigger whenever motion is detected. However, you will still be using more energy since it might be triggered by animals or other persons within its range. The above example can be used with any other room where lights need to be on for a few minutes only.

The above example has covered quite a few ways of saving energy. I am listing a few more below:

• Day and Time – (Turn on and off during specific days and time)
• Geo Fencing – Turn on only when I am coming home or in a specific place. This will not trigger when you are home.
• Sensors – You can achieve the above by using sensors such as motion detectors etc. I have a motion sensor installed in my hall and it will turn on the hall light every time it detects motion and then turn it off after some time.
• Sunrise / Sunset automation – This can be put under day and time but I prefer it separately as you can configure automations to turn on/off lights or appliances during these two events.

How to achieve this?

A simple Sonoff basic device will hep you achieve this. It retails around $10 online and Rs. 350 – 500 in Mauritius. Please use a qualified technician for all electrical installation. If you are comfortable with electrical installation, you can do this yourself, either near the light switch or near the light fitting (live and neutral wires required). You could just cut the wires and add the device in between. Again, use a qualified electrician.

Devices that consume electricity – Can it be automated?

Let’s face it, we all have huge electricity hogs in our house. Cooling and heating are the main ones, we all feel super hot in summer and need that AC or we all feel cold and need that heater. Some of us do not have AC or heaters in our house, yet we have a huge bill. Did you know that it could be your kettle? Have you checked the power rating before you buy? Do not fill your kettle completely as it will take more time to heat and use more energy.

Let’s automate the AC and make is smarter.

Smart ACs are a thing now, you can turn them on and off remotely and even set the temperature and fan speed. But is that efficient or saving me energy? Not really!

Automating an AC requires baselines, such as when to turn on the AC and when to turn it off or when to turn on the heat and when to turn it off.

There are a few ways of automating an air conditioner, you can go the cheap way or expensive way. The cheap way includes devices such as:

1. SwitchBot hub and Temperature sensor
2. Broadlink RM Mini 4 and temperature sensor
3. Home assistant for native integration
4. Sensibo (expensive)

I have the first 3 and use broadlink along with Home assistant.

Switchbot Hub and Temperature sensor

Switchbot is fairly new to the market but has very strong products and they keep innovating. I like that! With the use of a Hub and temperature sensor, you can add your AC and set it to come up at a specific time, temperature or humidity. SwitchBot also allows you to create manual remotes for devices that are not supported and then they can be linked to scenes. For example, I have a routine that says if the temperature exceeds 27 degrees as from 21:00 to 04:00 the next day, turn on the AC and turn it back off, if it goes below 26.5 degrees. This is an acceptable range for me as it allows me to sleep peacefully.

This is a very nice device which can make your AC smart for under $50.00 (Rs. 2500) and also make you save energy. We do not need that AC to run all night.

Broadlink RM Mini 4 and Temperature Sensor

Broadlink has the same functionality of SwitchBot but I find it’s a bit more complex to use. One of the advantage of Broadlink is that it can be paired with any AC with its manual configuration. Additionally, Broadlink integrates natively with Home Assistant. I have an automation to turn on when temperature is above 28 degrees and off after 30 minutes.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant is very useful, one of the main advantage is that it is native to your home and does not require internet to work and it connects and binds most devices locally. In case the internet is not working, your smart home is still online. Another major advantage of Home Assistant is that it bring all your smart home tech together. Most smart home will not work with other products, Home assistant bridges that gap.

With Home Assistant, you can tap into sensors that would normally not be available directly to you. Let’s take the example of a Gree Smart AC wifi, this will allow you to turn it on, turn it off or schedule time on/off. But what if you need to turn it on and off when the temperature is at a certain degree. Well Home Assistant can help you do that as it can read the internal temperature sensor and use that to trigger automation. In my case, I can use this sensor to turn on AC or heat depending on winter or summer.

The above example will read the AC’s internal temperature and if it sees that it is above 29 and it is 19:00, it will cool the room down for 30 minutes. After that I have another automation that will run to keep the room going above 29 while you sleep.

What has been achieved?

As you can see from the above, using automations, I can effectively reduce energy consumption by allowing ACs to run at specific times and keeping the temperature within a certain range to avoid unnecessary cooling. That alone can save around Rs. 500, 1000 on your electricity bills.

Conclusion

I feel that I could go on and on about this topic, however whilst this post concentrates on lighting and heating and cooling, the same logic can be used everywhere. To summarise, with smart home tech, you can achieve massive energy savings by just automating a few simple things. Lights and appliances do not need to remain on and that will save you a few bucks yearly and you do not need to keep an AC on forever, keeping it into a defined range will help reduce the bill and help the planet. If you are up to it take the #EnergyChallenge and save the planet!

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Philips Hue offers a range of smart lighting including smart bulbs, light strips, external lights and sensors. It’s a whole range of lighting. I have been using the Philips Hue bulbs in my house since December 2017 and I must say it’s a game changer. At that time it was for testing purposes, to see if we really needed that. My wife was skeptical at first but she has grown to love it.

I started with the Philips Hue White Ambiance Smart Led Bulbs which has around 806 lumens and 50,000 shades of tuneable warm to cool White light from 2700 to 6500 Kelvin.

To get started you need the Philips Hue Bridge, which you can get by buying a starter pack or by buying separately. The setup is very easy, plug in your power and LAN cable and download the Hue App. Once in the Hue App, you will be asked to search for the bridge, it will do this automatically but you will need to press the round button on the bridge to get it discovered.

Before we continue, I must stress out on the fact that you need to get the bulbs from a country that uses 220-240v. Do not buy from the US as they are 110v and will not function properly and will get really hot. I have seen one or two shops in Mauritius that offers Hue products but not the bulbs.

Let’s get started!

Once the bridge is setup, you need to add your lights:

• In the Hue app, go to settings and select Light Setup
• Select Add lights and power on your bulb
• The app will try to find it, if it’s not there use the Add serial number and it will set it up right away.
• You can then create Rooms & Zones and add the lights to those zones.
• You can then control the lights through the app or using apple Home Kit if you use an iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad giving you voice control.

The app is pretty nifty, giving you good control over what can be done including routines.

As you can see from the above, you have some good features including power on behaviour, like what needs to be done when there is a power cut. Normally you would keep all your light switch in the On position never having to switch it on or off. I prefer that setup. You also have the option to setup accessory, like motion sensors or tap sensors.

Routines

Routines are another great function of the app. Imagine having your lights know when you leave and when you come home. That means each time you leave home, you can set a routine to have all your lights turn off if you are one of those who keep forgetting. How about your home welcomes you with a nice smoothing light when you return home. This is all possible with Home & Away routine using geofencing

Another great feature is your wake up and go to sleep routine which Philips hue handles pretty well. You can set it to start turning on your lights gradually as the sun rises so that you wake up to natural light and you can also set it to turn off at specific time. It can be scheduled for weekdays or everyday. The “go to sleep” routine is another awesome feature if you have a well defined bedtime. Let’s say you normally doze off at 22:00, you can set it to start 15 minutes before and last for 30 minutes and it will fade out till the lights are off.

If you have other lights like me, you can set other routines such as turning on at a specific time and the turn off later. I use this for my Goldfish aquarium giving them the required light they need.

Adding colour to your life

I became an instant fan of Philips hue and started to buy more bulbs to eventually replace all light bulbs in the house. Then came the big addition of Philips hue White and Colour Ambiance bulbs. Imagine playing with 16 million colours!

I have 2 Philips Hue colour bulb in the living room and 3 GU10 Colour bulbs behind the TV. I can set them to any colour I want to match the mood or when watching TV.

Watching TV you said! Yes you heard it right – Sometimes when a good movie is on, be it on Netflix or Disney+, I connect my laptop to the TV and fire the Hue Windows app. Let’s get to that in a second.

Before you can do that, you need to setup the entertainment area in the Settings area in the Hue App. It’s basically telling Hue where the lights are to better display the colours.

Now that we have the entertainment area set up, let’s get to that movie, shall we! So technically Hue has an app called Hue Sync for PC. Download and install, connect to your Hue bridge and it will find your entertainment areas. When you’re ready to sync your lights select your entertainment area and click on Start Light Sync and whatever images are on the screen it will reflect that through your lights. Try watching Avengers with this – I dare you!

Let’s Keep the Party Going

Got those special friend or family over and want to have a dance party? How about syncing your lights to your music and dance to that! Well you’ve got your home disco now.

If it’s music playing from your laptop or YouTube, fire your Hue Sync for PC and select the music option. If you’re doing this from your phone, you can get the iLightShow app or HueParty and dance to that beat all night.

Enter Alexa

The best part of this setup is voice automation. With the numerous Alexa devices at home, I can ask any Alexa in the house to:

• turn on Lounge
• turn on the Kids room
• set the kids room to 50%
• set all lights to 50%

Once the Philips Hue is linked to Alexa through the skill, a world of automations open. All those routines we talked about can be further automated in a single routine.

Let’s imagine its time to go to sleep and you do not turn off your lights completely, for safety purposes or kids. You can create one single routine called bedtime and from there add actions to turn off any room or set the brightness to 10% in one go.

Alexa also supports Geofencing to turn on and off lights as you arrive or leave and if you’ve got hunches enabled on your account you will get the added benefit of Alexa detecting a light left on that is normally not switched on during the day.

I have numerous light strips and I have some good usage for one of them. It is basically in my hallway which has a motion sensor for my Ring Alarm System. I have basically used Alexa to use that sensor to dim my lights. So anytime, motion is detected, it brightens up to 100% and dims to 10% when no motion is detected. Pretty neat instead of using on / off switch each time.

The Nifty Gritty

Philips Hue is a a near perfect system and is of very good quality, however quality comes with a price and they are not cheap. But the value for money is real. Like I mentioned, these have been in use since late 2017 and have never failed me. The bulbs are rated for 25,000 hours and have a 2 years warranty (which is of no use to me since I bought them in the UK). They are stated to use 9.5 watts maximum when at full brightness and around 0.4 watts when in standby to communicate with the ZigBee network. They are equivalent to a 60 watts bulb which is not bad at all.

Like I mentioned, you need to get them from a store or country that offers 220-240v like UK, France or Germany. I always get mine from the UK and use shipping forwarders to get it to me. Unfortunately, you cannot use Shop and Ship but you can use ForwardVia.

That’s most of it. It is entirely up to you what type of smart lighting you need or want to use, but invest in something long term like the Philips Hue. Sonoff is also great at controlling on/off but you won’t get dimming if your bulb does not support it.

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For me smart homes means automating small things that we normally do, like switching on/off the lights, checking the time, have some electrical plug on a timers or lights on a timer. Anything you can automate can be called smart. My idea of a smart home is definitely without any remote controls – Smart Home means voice control or programmable devices for me. This might seem expensive if you think of all those ads you’ve seen for Legrand or Siemens automation, well here I am talking about simpler stuff, non-expensive ideas that greatly help. By the way I am a huge fan of Alexa.

Let’s start small – Automating light switches

The basic idea here is that you want to automate your lights. But again not with remotes, a phone or an app maybe or voice control through Amazon Alexa Echo Dot. Let’s be clear here it works in Mauritius – I am using it.

How can this be done?

What you need is a small gadget manufactured by Sonoff, the Basic R3. This is available in Mauritius or you can order from Amazon/Alibaba/AliExpress or itead.cc (Manufacturer). I have been using this for the past 3 years. The only thing that has stopped working is a light on the device. As you can see, I have numerous times painted or tried to paint over it. This is the V2 version.

Connecting this is very simple, a little bit of electrical knowledge is required. However, be sure to disconnect the mains before working on anything electrical as a general rule. I like to generally have all my gadgets installed after the existing switch. You can absolutely replace your existing switch but I like the idea of having safeguards.

To connect this you would need to find the live and neutral wires of your electrical light and connect it to the input and output of the Sonoff Basic.

The live and neutral wires exiting your existing switch will connect to the input and other end will go to the output. After connection, restore your mains and you will find a black button on the Sonoff Basic, push that to make sure that your lights turn on and off and to ensure that it works

.

Next, you need to download and install the eWelink app and follow pairing instructions to get it working. Note that it only supports 2.4GHz WiFi and will not connect to 5GHz WiFi. Although it will connect to routers or access points with both channels available, I have noted that you cannot update the Firmware on those.

The Cool Stuff

Now that you are all setup, you can use the app to turn on or off your electrical lights. I may have not mentioned, this will work with almost anything for on/off function, be sure not to exceed the rated amps.

This is how it looks on the app.

What can you do with the app:

You can set timers, schedules for it to go on/off automatically or set a loop. It’s a quite a good app. Another feature which is great is that you can share the device with another person and they will see it in their app.

Taking it to another level

You surely have noticed that I mentioned that I do not like the idea of remotes or apps. Enter Alexa!

Once your eWelink account is added to the Alexa Skill, new awesome doors open. You can now voice control it. From any of the Alexa devices I have – I just need to say Alexa turn on the Garage or Alexa turn off the kitchen and Voila. Laziness Assured!!

One feature that I love is Geofencing – Geo what now! Geofencing is the ability of Alexa to detect when you are near your house and switch on the lights between a certain time period. Isn’t that cool. This allows me to come home at night and always have a lit garage and pathway. This is configured through Alexa Routines. Example below.

Unfortunately, we need to stop here for now but wait for next article on how my lights are automated – PS, it’s not with Sonoff.

Do reach out if you need any clarifications on this.

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