Smart homes – practical applications and the cost-effectiveness of central heating and domestic hot

I don’t need to control the blinds or the lighting (scenarios). I don’t intend to install an alarm either. I can’t imagine switching on a kettle via text message. I don’t think checking whether the windows are closed is worth the effort either. What practical use could smart controls actually be to me? Certainly for central heating and hot water. Is there anything else it’s suitable for, so that it’s actually worth the money?



P.S. Sorry for rambling on so much about similar topics, but I think they’re different and require separate posts.

A smart home is one that shouldn’t be energy-intensive.
Saving water and energy. Traditional light bulbs? Perhaps OLEDs will be the next big thing. A shower made of steam rather than a stream of water? Why not!
Switching lights on and adjusting brightness depending on whether people are in the room and on external lighting conditions. Outdoors, depending on the time of day and movement.
Independent heating for each room (why heat the bedroom as much as the living room?).
Air quality.
Energy management via panels.
Weather system, window opening, rain protection.
Health monitoring system - especially for the elderly or those with health conditions! Detection of fainting and calling an ambulance. Continuous monitoring of body temperature, blood pressure checks (whilst ‘sitting down’), or routine urine tests (so important, after all, for detecting abnormalities in the body) thanks to a diagnostic system installed in the toilet!

Not to mention obvious features such as simulating the presence of household members.

The possibilities are endless and constantly growing!

In my opinion, the best combination would be: passive+smart+energy-efficient+eco-friendly house (some of these terms may be considered redundant by others, as they are subsumed within others, but that’s exactly how I see it).

You can probably find plenty of articles on the subject. I’ve drawn on:
“Wiedza i życie”, 1 January 2008 (the most recent issue available!)
But there’s no point in rewriting everything. It’s well worth a read. There are two articles on this subject. One is about houses, the other about an office block in Australia. I highly recommend them!

P.S. A passive house costs about 30% more. A smart house costs 50%, or even 200%, more. It’ll probably pay for itself in the long run, but you need to have the money to start with. For me, it’s a lovely dream. I hope for some people it’s a reality!!!

So far, smart homes seem to be more about gimmicks than practical benefits; whilst simulating the presence of household members might be a good thing, it doesn’t require any installation or the like. All you need are a few timers, plugged directly into the socket

In my opinion, it’s still too early for this sort of ‘smart’ technology. Perhaps in a few (or several) years’ time, when all the components become cheap and comparable in price to traditional solutions, it will become a bit more widespread.

Environmental friendliness – fair enough – take solar panels on the roof, for example – but at the moment you don’t need a smart home for that; a solar panel controller comes as standard, and once properly set up, it requires no intervention.

Well-designed ventilation is 100 times better than a super-smart air-conditioning system – and it’s free, too.

However – as is usually the case with electronics – a cleverly designed and well-thought-out ordinary house will be far more comfortable than one crammed full of electronics and thoughtlessly built - You can automatically block out the sun from the TV with a roller blind, but you can also position the TV where the sun doesn’t shine



The problem with smart homes is a power cut – then you’re either fiddling about with a generator or some other contraption, because you can’t turn on the radiator

At present, a smart architect and builder are a better solution than a smart home.

Hello. I believe that a robust and reasonably straightforward electrical installation, with the potential for future expansion, is essential. It is difficult to predict the future of technology. Best regards.

Added after 2 [hours] 43 [minutes]:

Electricity prices are likely to rise, whilst our earnings will fall. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

I can see I’m not alone in my doubts about the practicality of a smart home. I wanted to use some of its components to control the heating, but I think it would be better to use controllers designed specifically for that purpose.
Best regards

I’d be cautious about that central heating control system too. These days, boilers are designed in such a way that you have to check them more often than the old ones, and the electronic controller can often switch the boiler off instead of turning it up.

The problem is that people try to compensate for design flaws with electronics. New stoves often perform far worse than the old ones. Where a simple screw in the door used to work better than a control system with a display, temperature measurement at 30 points and a continuously adjustable draught.

McRancor wrote:

The problem is this: people are trying to use electronics to make up for design flaws. New boilers often perform significantly worse than the old ones. Where a screw in the door worked better than a control system with a display, temperature measurement at 30 points and a smoothly controlled air supply.

Building intelligence isn’t just about control elements, but also about measurement. Sensors for temperature, pressure, air quality, gas, smoke, fire, light, etc. Everything is integrated into the network and accessible at every point in the network. I work with such systems almost every day and I really enjoy it. Emergencies will always happen – break-ins, fires, carbon monoxide from a stove, freezing temperatures in a flat, flooding and many other factors that we might not notice but which the building system will detect and trigger an alarm. As for the operation and management of the building, I’m rather sceptical; the controllers tend to perform rather poorly. When it comes to home heating automation, it’s better to rely on ventilation and space heaters. Here, the controllers work perfectly. The hot water supply comes either from the district heating network or from a heat exchanger connected to your own boiler (which runs on a simple automated system). In that case, we can also take care of air quality (humidity, temperature, CO₂ levels); using a cross-flow heat exchanger will allow us to recover half the heat expelled by the ventilation system (and that’s no small amount). Don’t write off smart buildings just yet; I’ll certainly be building mine this way, but according to my own ‘tailored’ approach to smart technology, rather than rigid rules laid down by someone from across the ocean in a different climate zone, and so on.

Well, Fyszo I’m keeping my fingers crossed for your project and your future home!
I’m also a fan of smart homes, and in the future I’d like to have a passive house with smart electronics (as fault-free as possible – maybe that’ll make up for my ).
Whenever I read news on this topic, it breaks my heart that I live in a block of flats. But perhaps when/if I manage to build my own home, everything will be more efficient, reliable and cheaper – that’s how I console myself.

I think (unfortunately) that small houses have fewer opportunities to draw inspiration from nature, due to their size (I hope this is a mistaken conclusion after reading ‘The Green Skyscraper’ in Wiedza i Życie, 1 January 2008) – air currents, evaporation and… what else…
(perhaps Fyszo you could jot something down on this subject and refute my assumptions if you have a moment, it’ll probably be useful AFRO_FM , and others, including me, would love to read it).