Finding the chase and cutting to it

It has been one of those Sundays. You know the ones I mean, you wake up with good intentions. Of taking it easy, having a proper day of rest. Instead, you paint a couple of walls in a bedroom, including all the clearing up. You cook a roast dinner and make 750ml of stock. And prep the joint for the left over meals next week.

“I feel like I’m on the gravy train” was a throw away line to my husband. He thought that was an apt summation of today.

I also want to remove all the masking tape from said bedroom (the last two walls this weekend mean the job is completed). Having had my assertions about the programmable bulbs helping us to remove “phantom loads” , I have four to fit round the house. I need to sort out trying to do the same for a couple of the other outdoor lights which has resulted in buying the wrong thing. Thank goodness for living in the UK and being able to make such mistakes. Phantom loads are where significant amounts of energy are being used without providing noticeable benefits!

And go for a long walk. I have already clocked up 4,000 steps and haven’t gone further than 100m from my bed. Inactive is not a word I would use for my time in our home. Up to a point, it’s why I have the home I have. I can do mad things like decorate a room without it bring chaos in its wake, and I can cook up a storm in the kitchen. Sorry, just having a break to fetch stock out of microwave and get the dishwasher on.

The long walk did not happen. But I did cook tea.

Don’t you run the risk of being called the Lighting Nazi again?

Home automation does not automatically meet a welcome reception. We did have some ‘false dawns’ as we started out journey!

As a family learning to make the most of home automation, we have all come a long way since then. As our son has moved back home, we have come to an arrangement about how everything works for us all.

It does take negotiation and everyone has a valid say in this. Lighting is a basic human right, after all! Google home has also helped, by grouping the lights and temperature control for a home in one place. While I use the Tapo app for much of the power sockets and lighting control thanks to ‘scene automations’, being able to turn on and off my bedside lamp from my watch is worth its weight in gold!

I am so glad I got our Kasa wifi controlled sockets and then lights back in 2014. Unlike more modern versions, they need nothing more than a wifi hub in the house. No Matter Controllers, no proprietary hardware. Plug them in, pair them to the wifi and go. Share the Tapo/Kasa with Google home or Alexa or whatever, and go. Simple, low powered. Just works.

All of the sockets are powered up all the time, the bulbs are pretty much 50:50. When the lights are left on, it is so flexible in how you switch them on. If you switch them on, the easiest thing to do is say what happens when they “power up”.

So you really are master of it all?

For me, the best thing is the automation for when we go to bed. As the TV and lounge lights turn off, the hallway and bedroom lights come on. When I am in bed, I then switch off the bedroom lights that are no longer required and all the hallway lights. Our landing light is on a switch only accessible from the far end of the house, so this makes things very civilized.

The biggest thing it has given us, of course, it the ability to manage our electricity use. Even on standby, our TV draws much more energy than the smart socket does. This has allowed our base load to drop to 100W most of the time. With the Powerwall, that allowed us the ability to run from our batteries most of the summer. The UK grid provided us with just 5% of our energy over June, July, and August. And only 27% over September.

That was our car driving (Nissan Leaf), cooking, vacuuming, dishwashing, clothes washing, tumble drying, hot water, hair drying, tooth brushing, shaving, working (computers and monitors), phone using, game playing, etc. When I stop for lunch, during the week, my monitor powers down, any lamps I am using, device charging, etc, and the only thing I use electricity for is heating my food. I could be disciplined and turn everything off, and on again, but that is not easy to remember to do every single day. And if I pop out for a walk, I can easily check on my phone whether I have powered down.

OK, so worth doing?

I wish the GU10 version of the bulbs had been available for the kitchen (although with 27 of them to do I might have more than winced at the cost!) when I did the kitchen. The ones in our main bathroom are brilliant – one of the rooms where we do use them as a regular light bulb, but the lights come on at 50% strength normally, but you can dip them right down to 1%, or have them off completely but allow the extractor fan to run without the load of the lights.

We have 7 more lights where they could be applied.

As for my office and the lounge, it would be hard to run these as cheaply. During the winter, when I start work, the desk lamp comes on automatically. When the nights draw in, the bulb comes on again 30 minutes before sunset, allowing me to work without pause. Then when ‘Sam stops work’, everything shuts down, the lamp waits 3 minutes allowing me to tidy up before fading out.

It’s not just saving us from using excess energy, it’s improving our quality of life.

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This post ties in with this episode on the podcast, which looks at what home automation can give you.