Smart Home Guide
“Smart” is being added to the front of so many products these days, from smart bulbs to smart plugs and smart doorbells to smart doors.
This guide could run on for a thousand pages explaining all this technology and how it can improve your life, but the key area for us to focus on is how can smart home products reduce your energy usage?
Smart Lighting
Lights with smart features can bring a new level of ease and excitement to your life, whether that’s from the changing colours to match your music or simply turning on as you walk through the door. But they can also help you reduce your energy usage.
Here are just a couple examples of how smart lighting can reduce your energy bills.
Away from home
Going on holiday, how often do you leave a lamp on upstairs to give the impression that you’re home in an attempt to put off burglars? Quite often I imagine but consider how much energy that wastes whilst the bulb is on during the day.
With a smart bulb, you can set a time for the light to be on/off or manually turn it on/off with your smartphone.
Kids and lights
As much as you may try, it can almost be impossible to ensure that kids in the house turn lights off when they should. If you have kids, just take a second a think how many times you go upstairs at night and see the upstairs of your house lit up like a landing strip.
But unless you go upstairs, how will you know they’re on and wasting energy? With smart bulbs, you can turn lights off from the comfort of your sofa when you know that all the kids are downstairs.
Smart Plugs
When it comes to smart devices and energy saving, it doesn’t stop at lighting.
Smart plugs can prove to be incredibly useful when looking for ways to reduce energy bills – here’s a few ways how:
Avoiding standby
Devices being left on standby, such as TVs and sound systems, account for around £30 of a household’s annual electricity bill.
In most cases, it’s easier to just turn devices off at the wall rather than purchasing a smart plug but it’s not always possible. Take a TV for example, if the plug is behind a cabinet that requires pulling out to reach the socket – you’re not going to get up every night to turn it off, are you? That’s where a smart plug comes in.
By using a smart plug, you’ll be able to turn your TV or other devices off at the wall with a tap of your smartphone or your voice.
Managing usage
Games consoles use a significant amount of power, somewhere around £25 a year per console.
Gaming is a popular daily activity amongst children and young adults, and it’s great for them to have a hobby they enjoy. But it’s equally important to sometimes limit the amount of game time, for health reasons as well as reducing energy consumption. A smart plug is a great way to create a set time that devices plugged in can draw power.
A smart plug is also great to turn off a TV remotely, which is useful if someone in the house has a habit of watching the TV to go to sleep.
Christmas lights
It can be rather frustrating to climb into bed and then remember that you’ve left all the Christmas lights on. Well, it’s not frustrating if you have a smart plug! By removing the need to physically turn the lights off, you’re more likely to turn them off thus leading to lower energy bills.
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