Hum...i thought about this when we rebuilt our house, and dismissed it. Apart from the central heating, i couldn't imagine real use cases except "show-off". Yup, my house can move it's own blinds and my phone turns on the garden lights....why would I? Also, I thought when installing everything new anyway, getting "normal" or automated parts wouldn't be much of a difference, but the total cost of a "smart window vs. a similar "dumb" window was at least 100%+ I get the use for single rooms, especially home theaters, but the entire house...
I'd like smart controller on hot water, where you could have week day and weekend schedule and once off triggering for doing some dishes or a shower, without it repeating the next day. Or once off alter the schedule before returning back to normal once the altered instance has passed. As you say smart central heating would be the main use case and it could follow a similar use case to the hot water. Tieing that into an external temperature sensor would be pretty cool as well, so you can heat the home based on ambient conditions. Being able to switch off lights from a central point would be handy as well, if you leave a light on somewhere you could turn it off from the phone. I reckon it would be possible to use face tracking to count how many people are in a room and turn off the lights when there is no one in the room. Although that is something you wouldn't just buy off of a random company, it would have to be on an isolated network. There's just loads of stuff I would like to do with home automation. But I don't have a home to automate :/
There are many things you can do to make life easier. Stuff like a wake up routine for automatic blinds and kettle. After work coming home routing for kettle, oven and the front door. Heating is just one use-case that is on a single system. If you think of your home like a single system, everything is a component of the system to provide maximum comfort. Eg. The alarm clock is like the thermostat, the blind is boiler burner and the kettle the radiator pump. Together they make up your wake-up routine like your central heating system.
Its all doable but a lot of that is nice to haves. I wouldn't leave food in an oven all day, waiting for it to turn itself on. Even quite clean but well used ovens will have an odour from burnt food that contaminates food if you just leave it sit in there. You could preheat the oven for yourself I suppose. But unless you're cooking anything other than a frozen pizza or ready meal, if you turn the oven on before preparing food, by the time you have food prepared the oven would be preheated. The kettle is pretty quick to heat up anyway. That kind of stuff costs money (as all automation would) but for me at least wouldn't bring with it huge convenience.
My workplace has "empty room" = "lights off" in the canteen & loos, but they used simple motion detectors, not face tracking.
Yes, but the motion detectors require a certain level of movement. If you are working on a PC or sitting on the john or watching television they won't detect motion and they will kill the lights. Ever been in the middle of business in the jacks and the lights click off because your motion can't be detected? I have and its not fun. You won't have the problem with face recognition.
Face recognition is computationally expensive and tends to go wrong, tho'. Personally, I'd be doing thermal detection using a Panasonic Grid-Eye. £60 gets you an extremely low-resolution thermal 'camera', which is nevertheless good enough to track a warm human body - even if said body isn't moving. Comes ready to interface with a PC, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, you name it. I keep meaning to email Panasonic about getting my hands on one for a future Hobby Tech column...
The trick with motion detectors in a room when your not moving much is to either combine them with a timer and/ or use a long delay before they flip to unoccupied. Something like only turn off after 10pm if no ones moved for 15 mins for a study. it means that the lights don't flick on and off all the time and it won't let you leave the lights on all night. I can't imagine face tracking would work reliably enough to count people in and out unless you had a lot of cameras
One of my main reasons for wanting to go into this is one of convenience. My wife has fibromyalgia which is only going to get worse as the years go on. If she can operate things like the heating, lights and a few switches from her bed or if we can activate and setup the heating on our way home (the cold makes things worse) then that would be awesome for a start.
That'd defeat part of the purpose of home automation...... reduce energy consumption. I often go to different rooms in my house, turning the lights off as I go. Leaving lights on a timer would consume more electricity than just flicking a switch. Personally, I don't think individual light switching is required for home automation. Automated ALL-OFF would be useful when the last person leaves the house. But apart from that, manual control works more reliably than automation for most rooms. Only lights I'd convert to fully autonomous would be: - Under the stair cupboard (I've used IKEA wardrobe light here) - clockroom using motion/IR sensor or airplane-like door lock sensor - External lights such as porch light and garden lights (I've installed PRI sensor to existing ones or solar powered garden flood lights) Essentially you don't want to be controlled by home automation, you don't want to be forced to sit in a particular location or wave your arms after a few minutes. End of the day, the human should still be in control.
I'm not saying have them on a timer, just have the timer apply different motion detector rules at different times of day. Say for instance you have a room your study for example, If you use that room it's usually between 8:00am and 10:00pm so during this time the lights come on if motion is detected and then they stay on for an hour (unless more motion is detected then that hour starts counting again). However if its after 10pm and before 8am when you detect motion only turn the lights on for 15 mins (unless motion is detected). That way your lights should be used pretty efficiently and you can't accidentally leave them on all night or all day if your out. I'm all for energy saving, but this pretty much will not save you money (at least not for a long time) if you cost our running a 35W lighting circuit (say 7 5W led bulbs) and assume that this will run them for say 6 hours less per day This will save you something in the region of £10-£15 per year the equipment to do this will probably set you back more than £100 so you won't get a cost saving for at least 7 years.
Not at all convenience and energy saving, just don't assume that energy saving means that you will save money if your costing in the hardware into your calculation. It will reduce your electricity bill, just not by anywhere near as much as you spent doing it! *this is a broad statement aimed at most modest homes (which I'm assuming is what the people in this thread are talking about)*
Surely it can be about whatever you want it to be about? Security, convenience, saving power, saving money, etc. Automation is more than just lights coming on when you're in a room. "Buy this when the price drops below £100", "turn on the alarm when I leave the house", "switch off my hifi when I'm not playing music" - convenience is a recurring theme, but there's a broader purpose to these and most tasks/workflows.
All I'm saying is I wouldn't expect to see any sort of noticeable power savings from home automation unless you are incredibly negligent or wastefull. So the purpose would or at least should be elsewhere. In that respect, it can be about whatever you want it to be.
Exactly that, I may not need the kettle every morning, hows the automation to know? might as well push the switch, I don't open the blinds to keep the rest of the family asleep, on aother days, i open the blind, 3 seconds. An electric blind costs me 100€+ plus sensors, plus electrical wiring tbd. ~250€ per window. The only really convenient automation I had in the last few years was HERE DRIVE noticing when and how I usually drive to work and home and showing me the traffic situation for these hours on a live tile on forehand. Guess what Microsoft did...turned it off with the Mobile-Win10 upgrade, the stupid buggers. Yes...that's been standard in smarter or dumber form for about....3-5 decades, ever since central heating really (at least in NL and D)
My Tado takes weather forecast as outside temperature and predicts when best to turn on heating. Not as accurate as outside sensor, but enough to not need to installing one. I've also got something similar on my jailbroken iPhone as HERE DRIVE. Waze knows my commute and other regular trips. Whenever I get into my car, I unlock, put into holder and connect power, then Activator launches Waze when the phone connects to car Bluetooth, Waze automatically plots a route to work and home during commute hours. No button press needed apart from putting the phone on the holder. Personally, energy saving and using up excess solar panel power is near the top on list of reasons why I'd install home automation. Why do all those changes to your home and end up wasting energy? We are past that point in our shameful history, we need to only use energy when we really need to, and use the energy in the leanest possible way. (I'm constantly ashamed of my drive to work, and looking for suitable work closer to home)
