News — Energy

Aeotec's Nano Dimmer supports inductive loads up to 100W - now you can control your ceiling fans, or make your extractor fans run quiet while using less power.

If you've read some of our other blogs, you may have seen some of the graphs we use to visualise data from our home automation controller (Vera). This is all done with a cloud service called Emoncms. Emoncms started out being focused on Energy monitoring, but has been extended to include logging and graphing of any kind of time series data. You can also create dashboards with Dials, gauges and other widgets to give you a visual overview of stuff happening around your home.   In this blog we'll show you how to set up Vera to send data to...

When we last visited energy consumption for the pool, we'd just grabbed a beer after banking a $169 per year saving using Vera as a smart timer. If you're just joining us you can read that article here. Now we can review the energy consumption being recorded by our Vera Home Automation Controller and definitively answer the question "Is an ECO Pool Pump worth the money?". After reviewing some different pumps, I settled on the Viron P320 to pair with my existing Zodiac MX6 pool cleaner. Key features for my needs were: The ability to adjust the RPM settings to any value....

Bottom Line Up Front - I saved $177 per year on 'standby' power with one Z-wave Switch. My quest for figuring out where all of my electricity is being used continues. In this article we'll again employ the trusty Aeotec Smart Switch 6 for monitoring power usage and couple that with Emoncms, an open-source web-app for processing, logging and visualising energy, temperature and other environmental data. I go into more detail on how to get Emoncms working with Vera in another article. For now I'll focus on identifying where power is being wasted and how to reduce it - in this example in the...

Discover how I learned Home Automation could potentially save several hundred dollars on my pool electricity costs, without dropping a stack of cash on a new pump, just by running a timer based on sunrise and sunset.