I don’t know what the daily schedule is like at your house. But if it’s like the one at my house, it’s pretty irregular. If that is what you deal with, too, you probably also deal with a battle over the thermostat. Thermostats are our entry for a comfortable home, and with technology you can eliminate that battle and be comfortable, too! Plus, the bonus is that a smart home, with control of the thermostats, can cut costs in addition to managing comfort.
How can you control thermostats?
For the most part, someone is always in my house. A scheduling thermostat does not make much sense if maximum comfort is the goal. In this case, the user-friendly Alarm.com smart phone app makes it quick and easy to override any schedule with nothing more than a few pushes of a button. Ahh, the ease the comes with technology!
However, there are a few other ways that your smart home knows how to maintain comfort with little or no input from you!
Arming/disarming habits
The first way is based on arming and disarming your security system during different times of day or night. Once set up, simply arming your system when going to bed at night tells your smart home that you are going to bed and therefore changes the set-point to the desired level for sleeping. Perhaps waking up the most predictable time of day and maybe a schedule makes sense. However, if your wake times vary, you can tell your smart home you are awake by setting up a scene that disarms your system and makes the appropriate adjustments to your smart thermostat. Using your arming habits is only one of the many ways to manage your comfort settings.
Geofencing
Secondly, another great way to manage your comfort settings in addition to arm/disarm is to set up geo-fencing. This may be the most intuitive method to help manage energy savings. It is possible to create a geo-fence for all GPS enabled devices in the home. It does not make much sense to have your HVAC running when nobody is home, therefore you can enable “Smart Away” and override the current schedule to your “Away” schedule until you are returning home without having to do anything! All this is after the initial set up of course.
Smart thermostat
In addition, another great feature of the Alarm.com “Smart” Thermostat is the extreme temperature settings. Whether it is the middle of winter or the dog days of summer, we all want to feel comfortable in our homes. In the case of extremely cold or hot temperatures our HVAC units can experience additional stress that requires larger amounts of energy to operate. Your smart thermostat can be set up to automatically adjust to help reduce the energy consumption during these extreme circumstances. When normal or average conditions return, so does your smart thermostat to its regular scheduled settings.
Don’t be fooled by traditional thermostats
A common theme in home automation is “set it and forget it.” Maybe your schedule is predictable, and a simple scheduling thermostat is all you need. However, that doesn’t work so well when different people in the home have different schedules. That tends to happen a lot after a couple retires. One person likes to stay up late and the other is an early bird and goes to bed early. How can a traditional, or even programmable thermostat going to manage the comfort of opposing habits? Short answer: it can’t.
Automation is there to take it to the next level and save you money on your utility bills. If you are like I was prior to living in a smart home, you don’t realize all the little things you do or don’t do that can be counted and monitored and therefore turned into savings.
A smart home can be tweaked to get it perfect
Like most things in life, it is virtually impossible to set everything up correctly in one sitting. We don’t always see our patterns and habits as they really are. Therefore, it’s a great thing that a Smart Home with Alarm.com is easy to use and make changes as we recognize our patterns. The industry is constantly evolving with technology. As a result, there are resources available now to maximize your savings and minimize your interaction.
If you are interested in learning how to make your home a little Smarter, a lot more comfortable, and save you money in the process, contact me. With Alarm.com services we can change (improve) the way you live. We focus on building and maintaining personal relationships with our services and emergency service monitoring.
Mike