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As a result of a 'competition' entry, my employer published a story on their instranet about the way I use 'smart' devices in my home to save energy and reduce my carbon footprint. Within two hours of it appearing I was deluged with questions about what exactly I was doing, and how was I doing it!

The easiest way to answer the questions I received was to write an article describing my techniques for energy saving. So here it is!

Reducing Carbon Footprint

One of the most straightforward ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to reduce the amount of energy you use. Consuming Gas, of course, directly expels Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. But it's also the case that consuming electricity is also responsible for creating carbon dioxide: because much electricity is still produced by burning coal; while your house doesn't directly produce carbon dioxide, the power station does.

So, cutting electricity consumption can have a direct effect on reducing your carbon footprint. For a number of years this is one of the areas where I have focussed my energies (no pun intended) on doing more with less. Even if you don't care about the planet, this still has an effect on your pocket by reducing bills - so it makes sense either way.

How can you do more with less?

Technology is always changing and improving - and often technological advances improve the efficiency of a given appliance or piece of equipment. So, keeping track of technology improvements and adopting them where appropriate is a key strand.

The other main strand is to really question your own behaviour patterns and energy usage profile. Do I really need to do things this way? Do I need to use that so-and-so quite as much? Is there a better way of achieving the same thing? Changing behaviour is something we are all under increasing pressure to do.

My real-life examples now follow...

Low energy lightbulbs

An obvious example, really, but low energy lightbulbs can provide the same light output as a conventional tungsten bulb while typically consuming only a fifth of the power. These bulbs used to be very expensive but they have crashed in price in latter years and cost just over a pound from somewhere like Tesco. The colour tone is slightly whiter than a standard tunsgten filament bulb (a photographer will tell you the colour 'temperature' is higher) and personally I prefer it. Low-energy bulbs are also available as 'daylight' bulbs - which emit an even whiter/blue-er light, much more like daylight - and I use this type in my office because I find it makes reading easier.

The main downside to low-energy bulbs - apart from the slightly chunkier form-factor, which is improving all the time - is the fact they are not dimmable (although actually a pseudo-dimmable bulb by Megaman is now available, video here). I have to own up here and say that not every bulb in my house is low-energy: the living room and recording studio have dimmable lighting and use low-voltage halogen downlighters. Apart from that, all the bulbs are low-energy.

Where to buy online: I have used www.ebulbshop.com a number of times and have been very pleased with their service.

Smart power adapters/distribution board

These 'intelligent' power strips/adapters have appeared more recently, with the strapline that they take your appliances, peripherals and gadgets off 'standby' - a mode seen by energy-saving enthusiasts as the curse of the modern home.

'Standby' mode allows equipment to stay slightly 'awake' even when they are supposedly 'asleep' so that they can do things like remember their settings and respond to remote-control instructions such as 'turn on'. Standby generally uses significantly less power than when the device is ON, but with the number of 'sleeping' devices in a modern home reaching ten or perhaps even twenty or more, the standby power requirements soon add up.

Not all equipment necessarily needs to stay on 'standby'. My recording studio is filled with gear that will quite happily remember everything that has been programmed into it for six months or more, even when there is no power connected. Also, some of it doesn't even have a standby mode - so it's on full power until you take the trouble to turn it off. This seems like stating the obvious, but when you have ten, twenty or thirty gadgets that all need turning off individually, you tend to find you only do it at the end of the day when everything is finished.

An intelligent power strip solves this problem by detecting whether your PC (or other main item of equipment) is turned on or not - i.e. drawing electrical current. When the PC/master device shuts down/turns off, the power strip detects this and kills the power to all its other sockets. So, your printer, monitor, scanner, external hard drive, perhaps even your router can all automatically power down when you turn off your PC.

Additional power saving can be achieved by liberal use of  'hibernate' mode in Windows. My PC is set to hibernate after about 5 minutes of idle time. So, if I leave the PC for while - e.g. to answer the phone, or go and make a coffee - while I'm downstairs the PC will automatically hibernate and turn off all my studio equipment too. Windows restarts much more quickly from hibernate mode, and also brings all your applications back to where you left off. You can wield this control over your PC by visiting the "POWER' settings in the Windows 'CONTROL PANEL'.

Where to buy online: My smart power adapters come from oneclick [ www.oneclickpower.co.uk ]. My personal opinion is that the devices are excellent and do just what they say on the tin!
Special Note for BT Employees - a corporate discount has now been agreed, see Benefits Plus.

Automated Lighting controls

Of all the gadgets in my home, this is one of my favourites and it's always the one that guests love to see in action!

My interest in home automation started when I was a lonely bachelor boy and was often away from home on business. I put various lamps/lights around my home on timer switches to try and improve the security of my house by suggesting it was still occupied.

I was never entirely satisfied by this solution - firstly, it was very cumbersome to program and change, and even updating it for BST in spring/autumn was a real chore; and the timers were never very accurate, their clocks slipped. Secondly, it was all very predictable, and anyone watching the sequence that lights came on and off over a few days would quickly realise it was all done by automatic timers.

Then I discovered X10 technology and I was hooked. The crux of X10 is that it's a system that allows devices to communicate with each other over your existing mains electric wiring. The communication system means that X10-enabled devices can receive instructions to turn ON and OFF from a master controller elsewhere in the house. The master controller can be a PC running the right software, or you can buy a dedicated plug-in controller that you program using your PC and then leave running by itself (much more energy efficient!).

So what? Doesn't sound much different from having a bunch of timers! The real power of this system is twofold. 1) a variety of 'input' devices are available, such as wire switches, timers, movement sensors and light sensors. 2) The configuration of the system is controlled by software. That means you change it easily, all in one place, and also means you can create sophisticated patterns/sequences controlled by the computer that are not possible with traditional timers.

Here's one of my examples. In my living room I have 3 standing lamps and low voltage halogen downlighters in the ceiling. Each of my lamps is plugged into an X10 receiver - no modification of the lamps in any way is required. The lightswitch for the ceiling lights has been replaced with an X10 dimmer switch, that fits the same space in the wall and works as an ordinary switch - with the added feature that it can receive X10 commands.

The X10 receivers for the lamps are programmed with the identity A1, A2 and A3. The wall-mounted dimmer switch is programmed as A4. In the dining room is a wireless X10 receiver, which receives wireless remote control messages and sends them through the mains wiring.

If I press A1-ON on my wireless X10 remote control, lamp A1 will come on. Likewise will the other lamps if I press their respective buttons. And similarly they can be turned off. So far so good, but not very exciting other than the fact I have remote-control lights!

Now here's the clever bit! Using my PC I can program the X10 controller (plugged in elsewhere in the house) with a series of 'macros'. This allows several devices to be controlled all under the same command and also more sophisticated patterns of events can be programmed. It's a bit like being able to wire your equipment together in software - a kind of 'virtual wiring'. One of my macros is called 'movie mode' - when I trigger this macro on my X10 remote control it does the following: Dim A1 to 15%. Dim A2 to 15%. Turn off A3. Turn off A4.

Put more simply: this dims two of the lamps and turns off the other lamp and the ceiling lights. This is how I like the lighting for watching movies!

The macro is quite cool, but it still has to be controlled by me - it doesn't feel very 'automated' and we are talking about home automation after all.

So here's another example. In my kitchen the lights are connected to an X10 receiver. And the LCD TV is also connected to another X10 receiver. Discreetly mounted on the wall is a wireless sensor that detects movement and daylight. It transmits its signal wirelessly to the X10 receiver in the dining room, which transfers the signals onto the mains wiring. By programming macros in the X10 controller, the lights and TV can be made to go on and off when you enter and exit the room (with a delay, if you like). This can add up to quite a saving, as the kitchen has halogen downlighters that add up to 400w of power. I've found that another advantage of this in the kitchen is that you often have wet or messy hands -  and there's no need to touch the TV or light switch! In some instances it's useful to be able to over-ride the automatic behaviour - for example, I can force the lights to stay off by turning the normal wall-switch off.

These two examples are really only scratching the surface. I have X10 receivers in most of the bedrooms, in the garden and even in the garage. Various movement sensors control when/where lights go on and off, and daylight sensors control when lights can come on. For example, when the outside sensor detects first dawn, it triggers a macro that turns ALL lights off - so even if you accidentally left a light on overnight, it will not stay on during the day.

Various other combinations and usage scenarios are possible - bear in mind that you can dream up a new macro that 'connects' devices in a different way - and in this article I can only give you an introduction and help to spark your imagination of what you can do with X10. However, the bottom line is the lights and appliances in my house now spend more time turned off (or turned down) than they ever used to (either because of absent-mindedness, concerns about security, lack of flexibility/control or even laziness!), and this helps save money and energy.

Where to buy online: for more information and also more detail about X10 and home automation, I recommend SimplyAutomate - www.simplyautomate.co.uk - which is where most of my X10 gadgets have come from.

Network Server

A recent addition to the growing number of gadgets in my home is a network-attached disk drive, often called a NAS (Network Address Storage).

Some time ago I moved to a situation where all my music was stored on my main PC, and delivered over my wireless network to wireless music players, such as the squeezebox by slimdevices. This arrangement is very convenient, because it means no more clutter of CD boxes, and it means the entire music collection is available all over the house with no fuss. It's easy to create playlists for certain moods, for parties, barbeques and so on.

Similarly, my other files (such as photos) were also available over the network, so - for example - rather than pulling out a photo album, you can sit at the laptop and instantly find and browse any of my 12,000 photographs. That's a lot of album space saved.

The downside to this is that the main PC needed to be turned on a lot of the time - consuming between 200W and 300W in the process. This was not particularly good for the PC, and certainly not for my energy consumption.

A NAS drive, on the other hand, is basically a disk drive connected into your home router (e.g. BT Home Hub). Any PC on your network can attach to this drive and read/write files to it. The advantage is that the power consumption requirements are significantly lower than that of a PC - by as much as a factor of ten. Furthermore, the drive goes to "sleep" after it hasn't been used for a few minutes, but automatically 'wakes up' when you try to access it. By doing so it saves even more energy.

Another useful advantage is that (if you know what you are doing with your home network) you can make the drive 'visible' over the internet. This means you can access files on the drive when you are away from home. My studio (main) PC backs up its files to the NAS drive. That means my main files are available to all the PCs in the house (five) and also from over the internet, but my PC never has to be left switched on.

Where to buy online: There are lots and lots of places to get NAS and NAS-type devices (e.g. network enabled drive cases) from Amazon to Ebuyer. I regularly use Maplin [ www.maplin.co.uk ] because they have very good promotional pricing.

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