Motion sensors and Energy saving

I will start this blog with stating the obvious - At Faradite we are huge fans of motion sensors and the many great benefits they offer homeowners. PIR (Passive Infra Red) technology allows homeowners to enhance how their building interacts with them and create new levels of comfort and convenience, creating spaces that are a joy to inhabit.

The majority of use cases we see for our tiny, discreet motion sensors involve turning on lighting as users enter the room. From here, many integrators go further and create scheduled lighting scenes so the lighting scene that is triggered by the PIR best suits the time of day, for example; soft, low lighting in the bathroom at night or brighter ‘task’ lighting in the kitchen during the afternoon.

These enhancements to the domestic environment are great and are often the primary reason users opt for automatic functionality. But there are other, more environmentally considerate reasons that motion sensors should be included in your next home, mostly based around the detection of vacancy.

Occupancy detection is commonly used, most of us will have walked into a public bathroom and the lights have automatically turned on, or been in a parking garage where the lights turn on and off as we move through it. After we leave the lights are turned off, saving energy and giving the user a great experience.

But a vacancy detection configuration could be used to turn off power hungry devices or systems when we know there is no one in the property. For example, we could create logic that looks at all motion sensors across the property and if there is no motion detected, on any sensor for more than 24 hours, we could set the HVAC to frost protection mode. To avoid homeowners returning to a cold house, at the moment of doing this the system could send a push notification to the users devices to let them know the system is going to frost protection mode, and prompt the user to input the date of their return to the house so the system can automatically return to the correct mode in time for their return. Using PIR technology to monitor the space, intelligently suggest to the user that they may want to set back the energy hungry HVAC system and at the same time letting the user define when they want the system back to regular operation.

As you can see in this example, we recommend using logic such as this carefully, automatically overriding the users schedules would of course save energy, but may lead to them returning to a home that isn’t comfortable. Using the technology to create sensible options for the user to encourage energy saving without the risk of causing upset is the end goal here.

This same idea could be used for various other energy hungry devices in the home. For example, no motion detected for 24 hours - the system notification could suggest AV amplifiers and displays are turned off standby mode.

There are many great examples of this, but the key point to takeaway is: consider how the motion sensors can adjust the building when it is clear there is no one there, and has not been anyone there for quite some time.

It might just be the added bonus that helps win your next smart home project.

Any questions, or other examples of great vacancy detection applications, please email us on info@faradite.com.