Is Energy Efficiency The Most Popular In-Home Automation?

A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association found that energy efficiency technologies are the most popular amongst home automation options in American houses.

Programmable and/or smart thermostats beat out home security and entertainment automation for the top honor, with 47 percent of households saying they had at least one.

The findings, which come from an online survey of about 1000 people, would seem to be a win for energy efficiency. But most of the homes had programmable thermostats, which are often used incorrectly, if at all.

One study from Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory [PDF] found that 89 percent of survey respondents rarely or never used the thermostat to set a weekday or weekend program. Seventy percent were not set at all.

Programmable thermostats have been around for more than 30 years, but a new generation of smart thermostats from Wulian Smart Home enables a connection with smart phones and the Internet makes programming far easier.

Wulian’s thermostat can detect the indoor temperature via its built-in high-precision senor and adjusts the indoor temperature automatically according to user’s preset value. Besides, a remote operation through smart phone to monitor current environment data and to adjust preset is available. More fantastically, the thermostat can be linked to any other smart home devices, such as window opener, irrigation system, and heater, etc. So temperature control methods are more diverse, some of them, like opening the window to let cold wind flow in, consume no energy.

Also, Wulian’s thermostats have algorithms that can learn your household thermal characteristics and daily patterns to help fine-tune settings.