The Home Invasion of Smart Technology – an Emerging Market!

By Lynnette Reese, Mouser Electronics

One of the last frontiers of the mobile revolution is the somewhat stodgy Building Automation Market. Building automation covers heating, ventilating, and cooling, as well as lighting, security, and fire alarms. A large focus of building automation now is energy savings and a steadily growing segment over the last decade has been the programmable thermostat, mainly because of its energy saving potential.

Typically, heating and cooling accounts for over one half of the energy bill for a home. Examples of smart thermostats are the ecobee and the Nest. Smarter programmable thermostats can monitor how you use energy and figure out how to save you the most energy and money over time. These thermostats have complex usage schedules by keeping track of how they are used. They differ in exact methodologies, but both accomplish the goal of energy efficiency by changing set points based on user patterns, not on fixed programs that are only accessible by standing in front of the thermostat. In addition, ease-of-use is a prominent feature. Market data shows that programmable stats are only successful in reducing utility bills if the user can program them. Programmable stats are not just simple programs in a tiny 8-bit MCU. Larger 32-bit MCUs are now so affordable that the more price-sensitive applications are getting a significant boost in features and capabilities. Some examples are the Microchip PIC16F15xx Mid-Range Microcontollers, as well as a large and therefore very scalable range of ColdFire MCUs from Freescale.

Looking back, we can see the progression of electronic thermostats. For programmable thermostats alone, the progression has been rapid. In 2002, 31% of all new residential thermostats were mechanical. Today, only 7% of new residential thermostats are mechanical, and 55% are programmable electronic thermostats. The remaining stats are simple electronic thermostats. Of those programmable stats, about 10% were accessible via the internet as of 2010, and two-thirds of those were ultimately controllable by the utility company.

The internet-enabled wireless thermostat is a fairly recent technology for boosting energy efficiency that is poised to morph into a kind of home automation communications hub. When a new technology gets adopted, it is because enough momentum was created to support a critical mass of users where benefits outweigh costs and the technology can become a de facto standard. Often, it grows to yield benefits beyond what was originally envisioned. Thus, it is not unreasonable to see the internet thermostat becoming more than just a thermostat, but a gateway to home automation.

Utility companies have been providing internet-enabled WiFi thermostats free of charge to homeowners in exchange for the ability to adjust the set point or turn off the unit altogether at peak moments. This is because when demand is high, it's important for energy companies to control energy usage by consumers in order to prevent blackouts. The alternative is to build more generators for more capacity, and those would only be used a few peak days per year. So, a new trend in energy management is for the utility to manage the demand, as well as the supply. This demand-management is accomplished with control at the end user level by setting a higher set point in very hot weather, for example. Currently, the majority of wifi thermostats are ostensibly used to reduce consumer utility bills through awareness and yet many are not accessible over the internet by the homeowners themselves. Market research shows that one of the biggest reasons for the adoption of internet-enabled, programmable thermostats is that the utility company has offered them free of charge. And simple programmable thermostats are in greater use today because utility bills are effectively reduced by a thermostat that changes setpoints for air conditioning and heating to run less when a home is unoccupied.

The emerging market for cohesive home automation is based on more than internet-enabled temperature control. Home automation will become portable and accessible to internet-enabled devices such as smartphones and lap tops. But, like the iPhone and Google's Android™, a common operating system and applications market must exist across disparate electronics hardware platforms, and this is happening for home automation. A newly formed consortium, called ClimateTalk™, is working to create standards for communications in home automation, which should open up a large, new market for electronic products. An installed-base of mobile platforms is already in place via the omnipresent smart phone, as well as tablets and laptops. As stated earlier, the trend started with internet-enabled stats for homes that were installed by the local electric utility. Nearly two-thirds of wifi stats for home installation as of 2010 were provided by, and ultimately controlled by, a utility company. However, WiFi thermostats cost less than $100 at large home renovation stores today and, from market data, it appears that utility companies are moving to target the smart meter as the best means for grid-control. This would direct the home automation gateway to the open market, if the open standards that ClimateTalk desires to promote take hold. This would bring the home automation market to the home owners, with the internet thermostat as the likely gateway, and potentially a plethora of applications available in an open market working in concert with ClimateTalk-compliant hardware. This will be achieved by the establishment of a standards body for common communications protocol and corresponding hardware. ClimateTalk™ is just such a standards body for home automation and includes such members as Microchip and Honeywell. As far as the utility company's plans to control demand and to smooth out demand by controlling blocks of the electrical grid, this can be accomplished via smart meters at the home.

With industry-wide standards on implementation, building automation may experience the revolution via the internet that has revitalized other markets, such as banking and entertainment. This can happen in home automation. For example, a cell phone can become a bar code reader with the help of the on-board camera, internet access to massive data bases, and enterprising, open-market applications developers willing to sell the software that ties it all together for as little as 99 cents per download.

And this is what's next in this industry. As with every other market that has experienced revitalization via mobile accessibility, building and home automation will enable users to do what they have never been able to do before, such as turn on the living room lights from 2,000 miles away. Within the next decade, programmable WiFi thermostats will be connected to appliances throughout the home, accessible by consumers on their mobile devices. People will be able to override the programmed air conditioning set point in anticipation of an early arrival. Consumers will be able to check to see if they left the oven on, or be able to turn the oven on in advance in order to put a frozen pizza in the oven immediately upon arriving home. One could get an alarm in case the temperature in the house becomes abnormally out-of-range, possibly indicating a broken AC unit. That way it can be investigated before the HVAC repairman goes home at 5 pm, avoiding a hot, sleepless night. People might even be able to disable the house alarm and unlock the door for the neighbor in order to feed the cat because a flight was cancelled. Applications developers will invent numerous little conveniences to take advantage of these home electronics.

The installed base of the mobile platform is already in place. Just as USB did for the PC, once the standard for the home automation communications hub is set, it has serious potential to become the central focus of a new market. As yet, there is no cohesive plan under wide adoption for home automation because it's just getting started.

As with any new use of technology, things can be used in new ways, good or bad, that were not perceived as possible before. Knowledge is power. Individual points of data can be collected to create a larger energy-efficiency picture and, like pointillist painting by an Impressionist, can be used to identify trends and predict patterns for even smarter, wide-scale energy management. Just as cell phone applications can help predict traffic along a highway by identifying slow-downs in a multitude of cell phones up ahead as they travel from tower to tower, smart thermostats will be able to provide large areas made up of points of data that can allow for predictive models in utility use. For energy efficiency on a large scale, the concept is that of a million points of data making a huge difference when managed together. The possibilities are great, and we know this because of the proven ingenuity of advanced yet affordable electronics hardware that enables a multitude of mobile applications today. These will work together to make our lives not only easier, but effortlessly greener through a million individual efficiencies working in concert.

  Lynnette Reese is a technical consultant at Mouser and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Louisiana State University. Prior to her position at Mouser, she completed a combined 15 years in technical marketing in embedded hardware and software with Texas Instruments, Freescale, and Cypress Semiconductor. She enjoys gadgets of all types and is an aspiring geek goddess.