One of the higher priorities on our client’s cost cutting list has become their monthly electrical bill – a recurring cost that our custom electronic solutions appear to negatively impact. But we don’t have to be the bad guys with respect to increasing our client’s electrical bills. Thanks to relatively new, networkeable, powerline monitoring solutions, IP enabled and power sensing power strips we can give our networked clients the information to monitor and control much of the equipment that we sell to them, greatly reducing the electrical consumption of our solutions and adding a greater awareness to all the electrical usage in our client’s homes. In this blog I will review a couple of those products.
Electrical Usage Monitoring
A relatively new product from a Charleston, South Carolina called TED (The Energy Detective) is an ingenious product that can be easily retrofitted into any existing home to measure and graphically display all of a home’s electrical energy usage - down to a 10 watt accuracy! At the circuit panel you install the 2 current transformers around the incoming power lines coming into the home. These transformers then transfer real-time energy consumption data over the home’s power lines to a monitoring screen that you can plug in anywhere in the home. I have mine plugged into an outlet next to my office computer where I can keep an eye on every kilowatt that is being used. In addition, the TED 1001/2 has a USB port that can send the data it collects to my computer so I can graphically see the hourly, daily, and monthly KWH that my home consumes. Last year our home averaged 2400KWH/month - over the last 3 months we have dropped our average monthly usage down to about 1800KWH simply by becoming more aware of our electrical consumption and actively turning off devices that were 7/24 energy sinks. At 34 cents/KWH that represents about a $200/month saving - thus covering the cost of this device in only 1 month!
When you actually see the hour by hour usage of your electrical consumption you are much more prone to reduce it. Just as the Prius dashboard monitors mile per gallon on a real time basis, letting the driver know how they can immediately improve their MPG by reducing the pressure on the gas pedal – this home monitoring device alerts you to unnecessary lights being turned on, computers left on, pool pumps that may be on too long, inefficient refrigerators, and so on. In the next generation TED device (the 5000 series due out shortly) they will be able to deliver this data to a gateway that you can plug in anywhere in the home and it will send monitoring information that you can view on any computer or from their ZIGBEE enabled monitoring device that you place in any convenient location in the home. They have already announced partnerships with Control4 and Exceptional Innovations and we expect to see the integration of their energy monitoring portals in these two home control software solutions by this fall. I would anticipate by this time next year that electrical monitoring will be a standard offering in all of our custom control solutions.
IP Based and Power Sensing Power Strips
Once the obvious steps have been taken to reduce electrical power consumption in the home we can turn our attention to devices that can schedule or trigger power to be reduced in the home. For under $600 APC has introduced an IP based power strip (the model AP7900/7901) that can be rack mounted and uses a web based scheduler to turn on and off any device we install in the rack. If whole house audio amplifiers and not used between midnight and 6AM, we can turn them off, if media servers are not used during that same time period, we can turn them off. If the client goes away on vacation we could turn everything off in the rack (except, for example, their personal video recorders) while they are on vacation. If this sounds like the beginning of a recurring revenue model based on providing energy monitoring for our client’s homes – you’re getting the right idea. For a power sensing solution for the AV gear in your surround sound zones, APC has introduced the P7GT (lists for under $50) which will sense power going to the TV set. If there is not enough power to turn on the TV then the receiver, Blu-Ray players, gaming stations, (up to 3 devices) will be completely turned off – no vampire power is leaked to keep these products in a “sleep mode”. You could use the same power sensing power strip in the office to turn off printers, scanners, and fax machines when the main computer is turned off.
These products provide very cost-effective solutions that highlight the concept of “negawatts” (reducing power consumption) over megawatts (adding power sources). As the custom integrators of our networked client’s homes we are in the perfect position to education, install and train our client’s on how these products can reduce their monthly utility bills and mitigate their concern that our products adversely affect their monthly electrical consumption. Custom home control solutions will not only offer comfort, convenience, and security - but energy management control which will positively affect our client’s monthly cash flow – a solution perfectly suited for today’s challenging economic environment.
(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)
No comments:
Post a Comment