Holy futuristic dwellings, Batman! The picture above might look like modern art, but it’s actually a house. The Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype (CHIP) Solar House uses an Xbox Kinect and a 3D camera to switch off energy consuming devices with a mere wave of the hand.
Unfortunately, your own energy efficient house of tomorrow will cost you a pretty penny. The prototype cost over $1 million to build and its builders estimate that replicating it for a consumer would still cost $300,000.
Mile High Automation is now a preferred systems provider for Lutron’s new RadioRA2 system. Gerard attended a training session on the new system and shared it with the rest of us at the office.
RadioRA 2 is a wireless total home control system that gives you the ability to adjust the amount of daylight and electric light (using light controls and automated shades) as well as temperature in a single room or throughout your whole home.
Lutron.com features a lot of helpful information about lighting control and energy efficiency as well as an online tool that gives users an idea of what their energy savings could be if they equipped their home with Lutron dimmers.
Energy Star reports that the average home will spend approximately $2000.00 a year on heating and cooling costs alone. Larger and multi-zone homes should expect to be in the 2.5 to 3.5 multiplier. Using automated thermostats coupled with an intelligent control system will offer an average conservation of between 16% and 22% depending on usage. The real benefit of the integrated and automated home comes in the worst case scenario. For example, someone leaves a window or door open, the average programmable thermostat has no idea that this has happened and will continue tell the air handler to run. It doesn’t know any better, it is simply trying to do its job. The cost factors of this situation are hard to estimate(we have been told of monthly electric bills near a thousand dollars after just one school day!). The manufacturers do not plan for this. The integration and communication between the security system and the HVAC system are paramount in this instance. Our system will set that zone to a reasonable nu
mber (the control system will know the temperature outside) or turn that zone off completely. The decision is yours, we will program it to do so.
You will also not be locked in to a simple schedule any longer. By communicating with the security system the HVAC will know if you are home or away and react according to occupancy. Vacation mode settings will do the same thing. You can hold the temperature where you like it and just give the house a call from the airport to get it back to temperature while you fly coming home to a comfortable house. You can also remotely monitor your homes temperature or have the home call you in the event of an extreme low or extreme high temperature, saving you from possible serious water damage. Those costs are also very hard to estimate (though a client shared a friends figure of approx. $200K) and with our system you should never have to.
HAI recently published this pie chart, which shows the breakdown of energy usage in a typical home.
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