Increase Home Efficiency with these Home Automation Tips

How Can Automated Blinds Save Energy?

An architect can design your home to capture and store the sun's heat through passive solar design. However, suppose you have heavy blinds or curtains over those windows to offer some needed privacy at night. In that case, you will significantly reduce your home's passive solar heating capacity if you forget to open the blinds before rushing out the door to work in the morning.

MySmartBlinds is one company offering an automation kit that will allow you to modify your existing window blinds to increase your energy savings. This automation kit can work with your smart home system or can operate independently. The app allows you to view and control all of the rooms in your home and decide between preferred temperature settings. You can also set daily and weekly schedules and use a sun-tracking feature to maintain similar light levels as the season's change. With prices starting at $270, these smart blinds are a helpful addition to an automated home. They will pay for themselves through reduced energy bills and don't require you to purchase a separate set of blinds. For more options, see Rise's article on Automated Window Shades.

How Does Ceiling Fan Automation Improve Home Comfort?

There is nothing worse than returning after a long trip to a home that is stuffy due to poor ventilation. Automated fans could help you avoid this hassle with the ability to program ceiling fans. When placed in strategic areas of the home, you can set them to automatically turn on and off at specific times during the day or when temperatures rise to a certain level. The smart fans offered by Hunter Fan even have sensors that will automatically turn on the light bulb on your ceiling fan when movement is detected.

How Can Smart Vents Improve Energy Efficiency?

Automated vents are another way to increase your home's energy efficiency; these work hand-in-hand with programmable thermostats. Since almost no one takes the time and effort to individually close every vent in a room when it is empty, smart vents incorporate occupancy sensors that can detect when spaces are unoccupied. Thus, when no one is in a particular room, the vents are closed, and your HVAC system is not wasting energy cooling or heating a room that no one is occupying. This type of system is, in essence, a quick way to create a zoned HVAC system for your home.

Similarly, smart vents have thermometers that can regulate the airflow based on the temperature. The vents will automatically shut when the temperature of a room is too hot or too cold. Keen Zoning offers several smart vents for your home that can create up to 8 degrees of difference in temperature between occupied and unoccupied rooms in your home. They offer room-by-room options or a whole-home system called Ecovent. Single smart vents start at $99.99, and you can add a temperature sensor for $40. Whole-home Ecovent systems include vents, sensors, a hub, and a Sensi smart thermostat and start at about $1,200.