Does that smart thermostat actually help?
Do smart homes save energy? Are all our cool, connected gadgets really going to rescue the planet, one iconic design at a time? It’s an often-touted benefit of ditching your old, plastic white gadgets in favour of shiny new black ones. But is it accurate? Yes and no.
The sustainable living movement and the smart home have come of age together over the last few decades, enjoying a beneficial but sometimes uneasy partnership. Yes, smart home devices can save resources. No, not all of them will.
Some, such as always-on smart speakers and connected cameras actually use more, because they’re not replacing an energy load, they’re adding one (although not a significant one). Others, including smart thermostats and AI-powered water and energy monitoring systems, are forging a path to a brighter, greener future – and saving us some cash along the way.
Smart isn’t always green
“Not all smart home devices save energy but certain devices – like Ecobee Smart Thermostats – were designed to reduce energy consumption,” says Fatima Crerar, Director of Social Impact at Ecobee. The key word here is “designed.” While Ecobee and Nest, pioneers of the connected thermostat, claim their products can save up to 23% and10-15% respectively, you’re probably not saving that much. Most research puts the figures somewhere between 1% and 15%, and in a few cases energy consumption can actually go up.
“We’ve seen everything from really high savings for heating and cooling, to increases in heating and cooling costs,” says Nick Lange, Technical Lead for Thermostat Practice at VEIC – a non-profit think tank that evaluates the environmental, economic, and societal benefits of clean and efficient energy use. “With this new generation of connected communicating thermostats, caveat emptor. Just because it can talk with the internet doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to do a better job for you.”
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The problem isn’t the design, it’s the way we use them. A pilot program for Illinois-based power company ComEd tracked approximately 3,200 homeowners with a Nest installed for 12 months. The results found that average daily electricity use went down by 1.5%. But these types of studies need to be taken with several grains of salt, says Lange.
“The short answer is that it depends a lot on a number of predictable factors,” says Lange. “Including, what you had before and how you used it, and which product you buy, and how you use it.”
If you had a non-programmable thermostat and you buy a smart one, your energy savings will be impressive. If you had a programmable thermostat you adjusted seasonally you may not see much change. If you buy a smart thermostat and don’t enable certain features, you’re probably wasting your money.
On the plus side however, some thermostat manufacturers are actively improving their technology to take some of the guesswork out of the users’ hands and enabling the device’s smarts to proactively manage energy use.
Late last year Ecobee rolled out a new feature to all its thermostats called Ecobee+. Designed to help consumers move to clean energy sources while saving money and energy, Ecboee+’s initial limited pilot saved enough energy in 3 months to power over 1,000 homes for a year, according to the company.
Putting a smart thermostat in a home with single pane windows is a bit like putting a band aid over a fissure in the Hoover Dam and calling it fixed.
One big change Ecobee+ brings is a new Time of Use feature. If you have a utility with time of use rates, the thermostat can preheat or precool your home when renewable energy is plentiful and electricity is cheaper and cleaner.
The thermostat also displays when this time is, so you can see at a glance if it’s a good time to run other energy intensive appliances, such as a washing machine or dishwasher. This type of proactive technology, also seen in Nest’s Rush Hour Rewards program, holds promise for larger energy savings.
Today, however actual data on how much energy a smart thermostat saves is still hard to come by. Energy Star even created an entirely new certification process to apply to smart thermostats, eschewing its traditional laboratory measurements and instead modelling the energy savings using aggregate data from homes. There are currently close to 50 “connected” thermostats with an Energy Star rating, although not all of these are DIY devices, some are only sold through professional HVAC companies.
Connected devices can’t do all the work
Another major caveat when it comes to smart home energy saving is the home itself. All connected energy-saving devices face an uphill battle due to decades of inefficient building construction. Putting a smart thermostat in a home with single pane windows and no insulation to reduce energy consumption is a bit like putting a band aid over a fissure in the Hoover Dam and calling it fixed.
Energy savings through smart devices is a harder value proposition when retrofitting an old home because while a Nest thermostat may let you program less comfortable temperatures while you’re away, it’s not changing the duct work in any way.
A home built from the ground up to be sustainable has a better chance to provide greater energy-efficiency, with connected tech because the systems can be more easily integrated. For example, individual room dampers can be managed by a smart thermostat embedded in a smart light switch, which also contains sensors that can intelligently drop window shades to prevent solar heat gain and sense incoming weather fronts to get ahead of precooling or pre-heating.
If a home wasn’t designed to save energy, you’re always playing catch up
However, with less than 10% of the US housing stock being new-builds, we need to do what we can with what we have if we’re going to move the needle on energy savings.
In a DIY smart home, you can target some of the home’s biggest energy sucks: smart thermostats can cut a chunk out of the 48% energy use heating and cooling accounts for; electronics, lighting and other appliances that consume 30%, can be mitigated with smart plugs, smart switches paired with LED bulbs, and better engineered appliances (such as the June Oven with its advanced carbon fibre heating elements and high-volume convection fans that speed up the cooking process by 25%).
But if a home wasn’t designed to save energy, you’re always playing catch up.
Another potential route for greater savings is retroactively connecting a home’s systems so you can better keep an eye on their usage and then use that knowledge to help your home perform more efficiently.
At CES this year, Resideo showed off its newest smart thermostat, the Honeywell Home M5 Series Smart Thermostat, coming later in 2020. As well as acting as a smart thermostat – connected to room sensors that can monitor temperature, motion and humidity – the device can also interface with all your home’s major systems (as long as they’re made by Honeywell or one of its partners) to provide insight into how its using water, energy and even monitor your air quality.
Taking the concept of a smart home hub to the next level, this isn’t just about convenience and comfort, it’s about intelligently managing your entire home through one interface.
Adapt and change or…?
One of those systems is water use, and Resideo’s recent purchase of Buoy, a whole home water controller, allows the thermostat to interface with your home’s plumbing and alert you to leaks or other issues, as well as providing more awareness of your water use.
Buoy is a similar concept to Belkin’s Phyn and Moen’s Flo, products that claim to help reduce your home’s water use by identifying leaks and tracking use. Flo says its device can save over 10% through monitoring the temperature, flow and pressure of water going through the system. “Thirteen percent of water that goes into our homes is lost due to leaks; that’s millions of gallons a year,” says Gabriel Halimi, CEO of Flo.
For electricity usage, Sense is a device that connects to your electrical panel and learns the usage of your home, eventually identifying patterns to become more efficient. In 2018, Sense and Efficiency Vermont ran a pilot program to see how the technology could encourage people to use less energy.
The pilot found the potential for savings of $100 a year, or 8% of average household usage. “We learned that through more precise energy accounting we could enable systems that served more accurate insights and personalised feedback, creating a higher-quality, high-return relationship between people and their energy use,” Lange wrote in his report on the study for VEIC, which researches and assesses clean energy programs.
The onus, however, is still on us to make those changes. “I do think that these devices, given their intelligence and the trend tracking, help homeowners save energy,” says Sara Gutterman, CEO of trade publication Green Builder Media. “Just having the awareness of your usage and being able to monitor your devices, whether you’re in the home or remotely, and see the trends of your own energy use, brings value and some level of savings.”
Connected today, smart in the future
While we may not yet be reaping all the benefits of smart devices yet, smart home technologies are crucial as a proof of concept, helping show homebuilders and architects the benefits of incorporating smart home technology. Eventually, those benefits will also become clear to regulating authorities.
“In the not so distant future, some of these energy savings and monitoring devices are not going to be a choice for existing homes, they’ll start getting written into code,” says Gutterman. “In places like Austin, in order to resell an existing home, you actually have to meet a certain energy performance requirement. Part of that is through building envelope, but part of that is with energy-saving devices.”
Insurance and energy companies are seeing the benefits too, offering discounts to customers for installing and using devices.
Water companies are getting in on the action, offering rebates for Water Sense certified smart irrigation timers. By installing one of these devices, which can automatically adjust watering schedules for changing weather conditions, homeowners can save a lot of water.
“Together, the Rachio community has already saved more than 33 billion gallons,” according to Julie Reeves, CMO of Rachio, the first consumer smart irrigation controller.
Today, we’re the guinea pigs, providing the groundwork for a future where connected technology could provide actionable solutions
Data from these devices provide value too. Ecobee ran a program called Donate your Data – where customers opted-in to anonymously donate energy usage data.
“We package it into large data sets that we then share with the research community,” says Crerar. A group in Indiana used this program to design a system to improve energy use. “This research found potential energy savings that would eliminate the state’s need for a new power plant, and could save taxpayers between $448 million and $2.3 billion,” says Crerar.
Today, we’re the guinea pigs, providing the groundwork for a future where connected technology could provide actionable solutions to solve our excessive energy consumption.
“We’re still in the nascent phases of what we are going to see with respect to the benefits of the smart home because we’re still in the smart home 1.0,” says Gutterman. “The technology and devices are still evolving.” As we shift to the truly connected home, one with advanced sensors and systems that can talk with one another, the home will be able to do more autonomously to save energy.
“That’s smart home 2.0,” says Gutterman. That’s when the smart home becomes the sustainable home.
