Home automation is here, but it needs to be more energy efficient

Home automation technology is very close to its grand debut in a shopping mall outlet near you. The question is: what’s taking so long?

To answer this question, we need to ask the owners of many connected home appliances, such as Internet enabled refrigerators and thermostats that have been available on the market for a few years.

Home appliance connectivity is an innovative way of keeping track of what’s missing in your refrigerator, the temperature of your home, and much more information that is especially useful in active working households. Keeping an eye on the expiration of foods can save thousands in wasted groceries every year.

Saving money on groceries is a big deal, but are these appliances and new systems energy efficient? Not according to the International Energy Agency, whose recent study shows that on 616 Terawatts of electricity consumed last year, 400 Terawatts was the result of dangerously energy-inefficient connected home appliances, which caused over 80 billion dollars in wasted electricity.

The core issue affecting these appliances has something to do with many devices still consuming too much power while in standby mode. Some devices, including big name items, were reported as consuming the same amount of electricity, regardless of them being in standby mode or fully operational.

Many of these devices have LED lighting or displays telling time and temperature, and various other status indicators that constantly drain power from the grid. Even worse, these visual feeds are provided by software programs constantly running on the background, while being connected to the internet via WiFi or bluetooth.

WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS tracking, motion sensors and more of these features, are well-known power-hogs to mobile phone users, and many smartphones come with many of these features switched off, right out of the box, leaving the user the option of turning them on.

With home appliances, many of these features are on by default, sometimes 24/7, and while one would assume that “smart” home appliances are built with the same consideration to energy efficiency as mobile phones, the IEA begs to differ.

With Apple HomeKit in the works, Apple couldn’t have picked a better year to announce its own blend of home automation technology, as energy efficiency has been a focal point of the company, ever since the announcement of the iPhone 6, which is expected to offer a way to remote control every aspect of your home.

It’s easy to speculate that, with the International Energy Agency data at hand, Apple, as well as other major players into the future of home automation, will put great effort into integrating their connectivity and automation solutions with increasingly energy efficient home devices.