What is a Smart home and how can it help you to save energy?
With nearly 60% of all UK homes having a smart meter, and over 19% using smart products – lots of us are embracing technologies that help us to use energy more efficiently.
In this article we explain what it means to have a smart home, and how smart home technologies can help you to save energy and money. We also share how you could win some Smart products for your home.
What is a Smart home?
A smart home uses internet connected devices to help you to manage and monitor appliances and systems in your home. Whether that’s a smart meter that shows you how you’re using energy throughout the day, a smart thermostat that enables you to schedule your heating and hot water, or smart lighting that wakes you automatically in the morning.
They bring lots of benefits, from making your home practical and easy to control remotely, to saving you energy too.
What Smart home products are there?
As more and more aspects of our lives become internet-connected, the list of smart products grows. Here are some of the most common and more easily affordable, most of which are compatible with smart assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google and Apple Siri:
Smart meter: Smart meters are free from your energy provider, and are the first thing to think about when wanting to make your home more energy efficient. They send your electricity and gas meter reads directly to your energy provider so that you don’t have to, meaning you’ll always get billed correctly.
They open up access to smart tariffs and grid flexibility events, and you can use the data they provide to better understand your energy habits and identify areas to save energy and money.
Smart thermostat: Connected to your home’s Wi-Fi, smart thermostats enable you to schedule and manage your home’s heating and hot water using an app on your phone or tablet. You’ll be able to build a different schedule for every day of the week, create different zones in your home (upstairs and downstairs for example), and turn your heating on, off, up or down remotely, helping you to save a lot of energy and money over the years.
Some smart thermostats are also self-learning – meaning that over time they learn how long your home takes to get up to temperature and adjust their schedules accordingly. Popular smart thermostat brands include Tado, Hive and Nest – with prices around £200 – £300.
Smart valves: One step further than smart thermostats, smart valves enable you to set an ideal schedule for individual radiators within your home, and avoiding heating rooms that aren’t in use. This might mean you heat the room that you work in during the day, your lounge during the evening, and your bedrooms overnight.
It may take a while to recoup your upfront cost – particularly if you are used to turning your radiators up and down manually already – but it makes it one less thing to remember.
Smart plugs: Smart plugs enable you to remotely manage any plugged-in electrical device within your home via your phone or tablet. There are lots of ways that they could be used – for example switching off a slow cooker after the allotted cooking time, putting festive lighting on a timed schedule, turning your appliances off standby overnight, or double checking that you’ve turned off the iron or hair straighteners when you’re not at home.
Smart lighting: Smart light bulbs enable you to turn your lights on, off, dim them or change their colour using an app.
You can put your lights onto a schedule to gently wake you up in the morning or use smart motion lighting outdoors to enhance security.
Smart EV charging: If you own an electric car and have a charge point at home, chances are you’ve gone for a smart charge point. This enables you to schedule when you want to charge your electric car to make use of off-peak rates, often during the night. If you have solar panels at home, you might opt to charge your car during the middle of the day instead when generation is at its highest.
Smart charging has the opportunity to save EV drivers considerable amounts of money. At Good Energy, we offer a 100% renewable Smart EV tariff that has a lower overnight rate of just 9.4p/kWh enabling you to fully charge your EV from just £3.76*.
What are the benefits of Smart home products?
People are motivated by smart home products for different reasons. For many people, it’s a love of technology that inspires them to upgrade their homes, with the other benefits becoming more apparent later. For others it’s the practicality of the products, and the ease of using them remotely.
Lots of people enjoy the data that their smart home products provide – showing how they’re using energy, how much it’s costing and how you could flex your usage.
And finally, smart products have the potential to help customers to save energy and money – by helping you to avoid heating your homes or using electricity when you don’t need to.
*Price from Zap-Map’s home charging calculator, based on fully charging the UK’s most popular EV, the Nissan Leaf 40 kWh at 9.4p/kWh, which takes 5.7 hours using a 7kW charger.
