5 Simple Tips to Save Energy and Costs Every Day

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

What clever automations did you create to save energy and costs in Home Assistant? Let me know in the comments below!

[@sevagjb]

My dryer has timer in HA automation to cut the power when the laundry finished, the dryer keeps the heating on until you remove the laundry, in this way i save my energy (i hope) and my Honeywell heater works in a smart way, as you mentioned, it works at certain times and not work when nobody home

[@KaleoMgmt]

We try to use ceiling fans and windows before using the A/C to save energy. We live in Southern California, so heat is a bigger concern than cold. I use my Thermostat temp to turn On/Off ceiling fans. I use the hourly forecast to turn our attic fan On/Off. At 2030, if the attic fan is still on, it's automatically turned off. We also have Door/Window sensors throughout the house. If the A/C is on, and a Door or Window is opened for over 30sec three things happen: 1) An actionable notification is sent out to the phones (thanks for that tutorial!!). It tells us what is open and gives us an option to turn the A/C off. 2) Notifications are sent out over the Alexa devices so someone can walk over to close the door/window. 3) A 5min timer begins. After the timer ends, if the conditions haven't changed, another message is sent out. Thanks for the ongoing ideas and instruction!!

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

These are pretty cool ideas! 👍🏻👍🏻

[@EdwinPWeston]

Nice! I have been a Junkie since the X-10 days. Not sure how much energy this saves but... my favorite HA automation is a voice command/button to turn on the hot water recirculator pump (it circulates the cold water in the hot water lines back into the water heater). After 4 minutes, Alexa announces "Hot Water Is Ready" This avoids unnecessarily running water down the drain until it's hot, and living in Nevada, this also saves precious resources. The pump, which was plumbed into out new house 20 years ago, was originally on a mechanical timer to run in the morning and evening, but no-one in this house uses hot water the same time every day. Some day I should compute how much time we saved not running the pump unnecessarily.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

That's great!

[@nigelholland24]

Another great video. Was trying your first tip only yesterday and struggling. Thank you again.

[@johntisbury]

Great ideas and concepts, thank you.

[@Gladers.]

Nordpool has its own HACS-Integration that allows you to sync your current energy use with the current hourly electricity cost. I'm trying out 3 smart tools to give you a status of how the current hourly price is compared to the whole day. That way you can direct for example heating when that sensor show "true" meaning the current hourly price is one of 5 cheapest hours today.

[@RobvanKoningsbruggen]

I use some of your tips already. Here in Norway we have all electric heating units or heat-pumps to heat the house. I have different temp set points for the heaters for when at home or away, i use a zone for the village i live in, so that when i do the grocery shopping the heating stays on, but when i leave the village the heaters go to away mode. For the heater in the entrance hallway i check if the doors (front door / kitchen door) are closed then the turn heater on when the room temp is below set point The heater in the bathroom only turns on when the bathroom door is closed and the temp in the bathroom is below the set point, or when i want to take a shower i flip a helper on and the heater goes to higher set point. The helper is turned off when i open the bathroom door for 2 min. and the heater stops. The living room and bedroom are heated by the heat-pump and depending on the outside temperature the heat-pump is turned on and the temp of the heat-pump is set. When i am away the heat-pump is off or on 16c (lowest setting). when i leave work for home (30 min drive) the heat-pump turns on and set to the normal temperature. One hour before my bedtime the head-pump turns off or goes to the low setting depending on outside temp. The last big user is my cooking stove. I can not turn it on or off but i watch the power usage. When i eg. want to put a pizza in the oven i turn the oven on and watch the power usage, if it drops the oven is at the right temp and and i get an announcement that the oven is ready. When the timer in (HA) for the oven is done i get an other announcement. At that time a new time 5 min. starts so i don't forget to turn the oven off, if the power goes to zero no announcement otherwise a reminder interrupts my diner. If the temp sensor in at the entrance or the bathroom drop from the network the heaters turn on and use their build in thermostat and a notification is send to my mobile I can sometimes be a couple of days away from home so i have to incorporate fail safes for if a sensor or even HA is acting up. It can get pretty cold here in the winter, but the advantage is that i have some ski slopes at a 30 min. drive from home.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

That's awesome! Thanks for sharing!

[@emms-place]

Another great video. Thanks. I changed the majority of my lights to set the brightness to 75%. Most lights there is hardly a difference in brightness between 75 and 100. I setup a numeric helper to store this value. So any changes require only one change.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Great idea. I use adaptive lighting a lot around my house which works really well for me!

[@Lonestar101]

Thanks for another great video!

[@Eric_Tennant]

I may do a Arizona version of this video; however I added solar to negative my power bill using HA to play the peak game.

[@christian1603]

Thanks for the video ! I also have solar panels, but... I can read my digital counter, where I see if I send power back to the grid (so generated power is higher than consumed power). If you can do this too, then it is better to base your automation on this. Another automation to save some electricity : when the shutters go up in the morning, the lights go out.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Great addition!

[@riesmoos]

Tip #6: Watch your Smart Home Junkie videos on your puny smartphone/tablet instead of using your main desktop PC with a big fat graphics card and a 3 monitor setup. My HA is triggered when the audio amplifier of the PC is turned ON while no motion is being detected at/near the PC for 15 minutes, cause then I'm probably sitting on my ass watching videos. HA will notify me on my smartphone and tablets that it is better to consume that media via smartphone or tablet. I measured power consumption of my PC's a while back. The one I use the most is pulling 210Watts just at idle. Thanks for the upload Ed !

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Great ideas Ries! You made me laugh 😂

[@TheMennoM]

Nice video. I use the weather forecast to check if the sun will shine the next X hours. When above a threshold. HA will not turn on the heating. You can receive data locally from you SolarEdge inverter via the modbus. There is an integration for that in hacs.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Nice idea! I will look into that modbus integration! Thank you!

[@boorandras9723]

The 3rd tip is exactly contra-productive: The best cost-efficent way of heating a house or a building is: Keep constant temperature! Do NOT let the rooms cooling down when nobody are there if it should be warm again in the next few hours (or days).. I tested it out: We have a relatively well insulated family house (no common walls with our neighbours, where we could enjoy the thermal leakage of somebody else's heating or anything like this). I decreased the target temperature with 1.5°C (for 22°C) when we left the house for a weekend travel, around ~ 1 PM on friday, and we arrived home about 7pm on sunday. I used homeassistant to increase target temperature back for 23,5°C on 1pm on sunday, before we arrive home, to ensure, the temperature will be the usual when we arrive home. For us, this weekend (~53 hours) generates more heating cost than the next 3 days when the target temperature of our heating was 23,5°C constantly. (The exterior temperature was about the same (on that weekend and after that weekend too). Since I have all the neccessary hardware to control the temperature room-by-room, with using HomeAssistant, thereby I'm able to schedule targerTemperature changes, etc, but unfortunatelly it seems the best cost effective way of heating is keeping the necessary temperature even if nobody is in that room for hours or maybe days too.. It is sad for us, who built a system to be able to control the heating system based on schedule, or based on room-occupancy, but is seems the thermodinamical rules aren't with us.. I would love if I could save a bit from the heating costs with some clever automations, or heating schedule, but we can't.. Yet the open-windows -based heating contol (turning off the heating when any window on that room is opened, seems useful only if the open window -period is a longer time period (more than 5-10-15 minutes).

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Thanks for this addition.

[@sevagjb]

nice Ed, I'm planning to add solar panel to my house but not yet, soon And I'm using HA to control all my appliances direct (built in) or smart plug (with watt monitoring) very useful ideas 👌

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Great!

[@jaap7374]

Dynamic (hourly) prices are very interesting at the moment. You pay the actual price for energy. Shifting just a bit of load (using HA automations) can save hundreds of euros per year (Or thousands of euros when you have an EV)

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Indeed. It's on my list to scrape these prices too. But time...

[@jaap7374]

@@SmartHomeJunkie HACS has the nordpool Integration for this.

[@RikardKjell]

Great inspiration for energy savings. The one thing that consumes power (non-stop earlier) in my humble appartment was after some analyzing (quite obvious for me in retrospect) the ventilation unit. This is a "dumb" unit that is always on. To make it somewhat smarter or at least being able to control it, I bought a smart-plug for it and made automations to turn it off most of the time when nobody is at home. Only with a shorter ventilation cycle every hour or half an hour. When no "biological" activity is present at home the need for ventilation is minimal.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Great use case too!

[@stijnmoke6184]

Downside to that is, that in fact, it is not safe to turn off ventilation units, cause it causes bacterials in the canals... What ventilation do you have? I was thinking about it too, cause my ventilation is on the attic, and it has 3 stands (low, medium and high) and although its always at low, i would love to change it with automations

[@RikardKjell]

@@stijnmoke6184 I doubt that would be an issue. While away I set it to keep on doing ventilation-cycles though less periodically. Same here but vendors recommendation is mid-level as "normal". Low only as "away" mode and high as "a-lot-of-people-in-da-house" kind of mode. Mid-level in cycles when being round-and-about was my solution for a lazier life without worries ;-)

[@stijnmoke6184]

@@RikardKjell oh, its always set as low here... i dont change it, cause i need to walk to the attic for that

[@joenie69]

Older pumps for underfloor heating can use a lot of energy. So I created an automation that turns off the pump when the heating is off and turns the pump back on when the heating is on.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Great option!

[@christian1603]

Addition to your 3rd tip: don't forget TV / hi-fi. Another of my last energy saving automations was the bathroom heating. The electric blower stayed on regularly when leaving the bathroom... now it turns off as soon as there is no movement for a while. The possibility to obtain a basic temperature in the bathroom (during off-peak hours) is also provided (interesting if you have to enter the bathroom shortly afterwards).

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Ah yes! I have a humidity sensor in my bathroom. As soon as the humidity drops below a certain value, the fan turns off. (And vice versa)

[@christian1603]

@@SmartHomeJunkie Very glad with this automation, cause with a teenager in the house... 🙄

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

@@christian1603 indeed... Same situation here.

[@bat3332]

one day i will have my house and implement all of these . when you are in rentals the scope automation are limited to the portability of the project that can be shifted to next rental

[@danielwedekind184]

great video, thank you. I still have a question about tip 3: when I'm back home and switch the heating on with "all", what value does it have? a fixed value, or the value before switching off?

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

In my case, it will go back to the preset of the heating. You can also just change the temperature.

[@danielwedekind184]

@@SmartHomeJunkie thanks ☺️👍

[@joeconstable3181]

Thanks for another great video! In the case of your lights, do you have any ideas for how to deal with the following situation? Say for example that you turn the light on by accident (maybe your voice assistant misheard or you did it on the app in your pocket), normally when the motion stops being detected the light will turn off. However, if motion wasn't detected when the light turned on, the light will stay on until the next time the sensor registers motion, and then only when the sensor becomes clear will the light turn off. Best way to deal with this?

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Good question! What you can do is start a timer when the switch is turned on and turn off the light after the timer ended. it's a suboptimal solution, but it might work. I will think more about this because it's a nice use case. In my case, all my switches are within the vision of my motion sensors, so i do not have that issue myself.

[@joeconstable3181]

@@SmartHomeJunkie Thank you for your reply. It's a conundrum that I've not been able to solve as of yet. I have one situation where it's an issue. I have a two-gang smart switch downstairs which controls my hall light and a smart bulb upstairs (separate switch for each light). Sometimes I want to turn the landing light on before I walk up the stairs, but I can't use the hall motion sensor for this, because I don't want it to trigger my upstairs light if I'm just walking through the hall. If I press the button to turn on the light, and then get distracted and don't end up going upstairs the light then obviously stays on as the upstairs motion event doesn't get triggered. I could use the downstairs one but then obviously if motion stops downstairs I run the risk of turning on the light when I'm upstairs. I suppose I could try using an automation for the downstairs motion sensor to turn off the light only if the upstairs isn't detecting motion. Or, potentially trigger an input boolean when the light is on to turn it off, but getting a bit lost in it all really! I'll dig a bit into a timer solution. Thank you so much for your reply and all your really helpful videos. Edit: I think the example I described is trickier than my specific situation as I should be able to do with automations with conditions for motion sensors. However, the example of using the phone to turn it on is still hurting my head!

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

@@joeconstable3181 I do have the same sort of situation here. I have a motion sensor in the hall downstairs and one in the hall upstairs. The motion sensor in the hall upstairs does not pick up motion of In downstairs, but starts absinthe motion when I'm halfway up the stairs. Same counts the other way around. This way I never have to use a switch.

[@manfredzimmer1199]

👍 i like your Videos 👍

[@HeinzMeulke]

I live in South Africa, I have solar but we are not allowed to feed excess power to the grid, what you cannot use is lost. I have a heatpump that switches on every day (automated to run during solar production hours) to heat water. Once it reaches 55 degrees Celsius the heatpump is not effective any more and stops. I am busy with an automation to detect the end of the heatpump cycle. I have built a little ESP8266 circuit with a NTC (heat sensor) and driving a small relay that drives a large power relay(230V 40A) that then switches on the power to the resistive element and dumps the excess energy into the water, heating it well above 55 degrees (but should not draw from the battery nor consume any power from the grid and should only run when the battery is 100% charged). Using ESPhome. To anyone trying to save money, your biggest saving will come from the item that consumes the most power, switching off a light or two will not make a noticeable difference. First check where you are using the most power and then look for any losses. In my case this was heating water and installing the heatpump made a huge difference in the bill, next I insulated all the pipes and then looked at running it purely from self generated solar (using automations to ensure I buy the least amount of power from the grid). I first tried swtching the water heating off and only heating just in time for when I need to take a shower, but the saving was rather small

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Thank you for this excellent addition! 👍🏻👍🏻

[@jezper1000]

Thanks for all your great videos. I have a function that I don't quite know how to make and haven't seen others make it either. I would like to be able to activate and deactivate a pir sensor via a push button, so that it does not turn off the light when I have pressed deactivate pir and turns off the light (after the expiry time) has expired agter I aktivte the pir again.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Ah, that's not difficult to do at all! It's actually a good idea for a video or short.

[@jezper1000]

@@SmartHomeJunkie That would be amazing 💪💪💪 or if you could activate or deactivate an automation from another automation with a button

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

@@jezper1000 Actually, I already created a video about that: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qX_QoKGrrJl4ftE

[@emms-place]

In most of your previous automations you use the choose, why did you use and if statement with these?

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

If Then is introduced later in Home Assistant. Before that, only Choose was available.

[@Synt3x1337]

Which LUX sensors are you using? I currently only have one that talk zig bee (hue motion sensor)

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

I use mostly zigbee sensors as well (Hue and Aqara) and I built one myself with ESPHome.

[@MitsumaYT]

I wonder if turning on/off the heater/radiator is really the best idea if you leave. Mostly wondering because you hear people say that keeping a room warm is easier than heating it back up. I guess it kinda depends on the situation, how well your place keeps the heat but I have no answer what is really right. You could probably just turn down the heat I suppose.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Yes indeed. Lowering the temperature is also an option.

[@bat3332]

I think you should be doing a video on projects that rental people can build . may be call the video something as "portable rentaltainers" prerequite when making video for rental please bear in mind to take the background as an admant landlord who does not allow any changes to exiting heaters, ledlight or switch or power point. The only portable home automation i can come up is washing machine which you have already posted one. so please see if you could make video sepcifically for poor rentalist like us

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Yes, for rentalists, this might be a challenge indeed. I will try to think of some use cases.

[@JasperJanssen]

I take it you are not using the local-control evohome thing where you plug a special usb stick into your HA that can read and write the RF signals directly?

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

Indeed. And unfortunately, the local API is not exposed. But I'm fine with the cloud solution for now.

[@JasperJanssen]

@@SmartHomeJunkie do you have a video (or just GitHub source or something like that) for what you’re doing in your dashboards for controlling the evohome? The various thermostat controls I’ve tried on the climate entities are sort of half-to-mostly working, I’ve found.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

@@JasperJanssen I just use climate.turn_on or climate.turn_off or climate.set_temperature and they all work fine. I also use the mushroom climate card. The slider button card also worked fine, but I think it's no longer in HACS.

[@JasperTielen]

Tip 2, why leave the light on for 5 minutes? This means you went through the hallway in 10 seconds or less and the lights are on for 5 minutes. I'm using home assistant a lot but automation for lights isn't saving energy in most situations, turn on and off by hand should be the best solution.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

When you're in the kitchen or bathroom, it can be that you are sitting still for a minute or so and then the lights turn off. This is why I set it to 5 minutes so that the window of time is longer. But yes, I agree, using switches is most of the time cheaper, at least when you have no kids in your house. When you have kids, motion sensors can be a life-saver.

[@alexandrosnaoum1318]

Still I'm very confused in some part of the trigger/actions. I see that you are using a lot the Device in the trigger or action section (with the exception of the left open a light). A lot of people in the community forum people are using the state of the Entity for trigger and for lights even the admins are suggesting to use Call Service. Any advice on that?

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

It depends on what the use case is. You can use the device trigger if you only want to switch one device. If you use groups or other things a call service is needed. I just wanted to create some simple examples. In a lot of cases, you will need to use call service.

[@iSpaceCab]

The variables for ikea PIR motion sensors are worded differently & I can’t work out how to set ‘only trigger action if luminance is above X’ Can’t you advise please?

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

The trigger is: Motion sensor illuminance above threshold turned on. The problem is that you cannot at the threshold in Home Assistant. The threshold can be set on the device itself as far as I recall.

[@iSpaceCab]

Hmm, not sure how to do that but will explore. Thank you 😊👍🏼

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

@@iSpaceCab I believe there's a dial within those devices that you can use to set the threshold. Pretty oldschool ;)

[@AndyKennedy]

Looks like the "Light turn on" just type all trick doesn't work anymore :(

[@Einstine1984]

Led lights are SOOO efficient that a single led light that works continuously for a full month won't amount to a single €/$. There's really no point sitting in the dark to save money. Don't bother.

[@ronzoot602]

1051 euro per month electricity and gas :( years for these crazy prices it was 285 euros per month

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

It's totally crazy these days :(

[@jaap7374]

I invested in isolation, heatpump and other every saving upgrades a few years ago. The contractor said it would barely pay itself back. He wasn't wrong with the knowledge at the time. My energy bill is close to €0 and return on investment is down from 20 years to just 5.

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

@@jaap7374 That's a lot. Seems like a very good decision at that time!

[@benbewust]

He’s Dutch 😂

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

You don't say!

[@videosfromniek]

If nobody is home the proximity is above 0 if at home than it is zero (0)

[@SmartHomeJunkie]

For proximity yes, for Zone it is 0 when nobody is home.