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Toys Article - February 2000 - [HTI Home Page] |
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Energy Management with The Smart HouseKeeper Inspired by the lack of a complete low cost home automation system, Smart Electronics Corporation has teamed up with HomAtion Systems to offer this low cost, feature rich home automation solution. For around 200 bucks, you get HomAtion 2000’s powerful graphical user’s interface, thermostat control, paging capabilities, text to speech and audio responses, weather monitoring, and object oriented automation. |
One advantage of using a home automation system is to conserve energy. Beyond simple timer controls of lights, wouldn't it be useful if there were a way you could budget your energy usage? This month, we'll show how you can use digital inputs on The Smart Housekeeper with a low cost digital power meter sensor which translates passes of your power meter's rotary accumulator to digital pulses for interpretation by the Smart Housekeeper.
Project Overview:
Below, we'll show how the Smart Housekeeper can be used to measure total consumed energy and switch a schedule for a device based on the amount consumed.
Figure 1: The Layout:
Reset Budget: A time scheduled (monthly) reset action that sets the total consumed power to 0. Can also be triggered by any event.
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Hot Tub Heater: X-10 control for the heater circuit of the Hot Tub
Economy Schedule: Control schedule for the Hot Tub Heater when the buget is exceeded
Normal Schedule: Control schedule for the Hot Tub Heater when the budget has not been exceeded
Over Budget: Logical Variable set when the budget has been exceeded.
Our layout consists of a budget meter, an Over Budget indicator, a meter sensor input, two schedules, and a Hot Tub heater control.
The user’s budget is set by adjusting the budget multiplier as shown in Figure 2: When the budget exceeds 100%, the Over Budget indicator is set and the Hot Tub Heater follows the Economy schedule. As long as the budget meter is less than 100%, the Hot Tub Heater will follow the normal schedule.
Figure 2: Adjusting the multiplier
The number of times the power meter revolves before incrementing the budget counter is controlled by this dialog box. When the value is >=5, reset the value to 0.
Controlling the load based on the status of the budget:
Our load in this example is a hot tub heater. We had indicated that it is required to allow the load to follow one of two schedules based on whether the budget had been exceeded or not. So, we've created two independent schedules called 'Economy Schedule' and 'Normal Schedule' Each of these schedules is capable of controlling the load called 'Hot Tub Heater', but the control is dependant on the variable called 'Over Budget' Figure 3 shows the Other Conditions tab where the 'Over Budget' variable is granted control of the load. This variable effectively turns on or off the required schedule.
Figure 3: Controlling the load based on budget:
Here, we've added an 'Other Condition' to the event called 'Set Heater'. When Over Budget = On, set the Hot Tub Heater to the same as Economy Schedule as shown in Figure 4
Figure 4: Setting the load 'Hot Tub Heater' to follow the economy schedule
Figure 5: Low Consumption Budget Schedule
Figure 6: Normal Consumption Budget Schedule.
If you'd like to go into detail regarding the design, or you'd like more information visit us at www.smartgateway.com, e-mail us at support@smartgateway.com, or call us at 248-828-8159. We'd love to hear from you!
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Introduction to The Smart Housekeeper Background: Inspired by the lack of a complete low cost home automation system, Smart Electronics Corporation has teamed up with HomAtion Systems to offer this low cost, feature rich home automation solution. For around 200 bucks, you get HomAtion 2000’s powerful graphical user’s interface, thermostat control, paging capabilities, text to speech and audio responses, weather monitoring, and object oriented automation. Upgradability: The Smart Housekeeper is a great solution for people who are just entering the ‘Home Automation’ buzz. It provides 2-way X-10 control of lighting, RCS X-10 Thermostats, and appliances, two-way infra-red control of audio/video equipment, four double pole, double throw on-board relays, and four additional outputs for external devices. However, if you find your I/O needs have exceeded the Smart Housekeeper, you can upgrade to employ the AD Net line on RS-485 I/O modules as well as the StatNet RS-485 thermostats. Speech Recognition: Do you or your customers have disabilities? Do your customers desire the freedom of voice control from open air microphones? The Smart Housekeeper employs Verbex’s Listen for Windows for speech command and control of scenes, lighting and macros. If you’ve seen the excellent recognition capabilities of HomeVoice, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s the same recognition accuracy of the Verbex engine that brings speech controlled life to the Smart Housekeeper. |
