Tips From The Top

It’s a sweet luxury to have smart home technology: a hot tub warmed up and waiting when you get home from work, a lighting scheme and music playlist perfect for your dinner party. Smart home owners enjoy the ease and simplicity of being able to manage their home’s technology and energy systems from their smart phone. 

But there’s an even bigger, more important reason to invest in smart home technology today: your home can reduce your family’s energy consumption, saving you money and contributing to our planetary need to reduce our carbon footprint.

According to a landmark report released in October from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, our planet is on the verge of a global crisis due to rising temperatures. The report, requested by the 2015 Paris Agreement, calls for immediate and sweeping action to mitigate the effects of global warming. If we don’t reduce our energy consumption now, we will begin seeing catastrophic world changes by 2040. Many changes are underway and already visible.

The report says that carbon dioxide emissions need to fall 45% by 2030 and reach net zero around 2050. At that point, remaining emissions will need to be offset by removing CO2 from the air.

While broad society changes to address this crisis are necessary in developed countries, individuals and small groups of people can also take positive steps to reduce their carbon footprints.

Here’s where you smart home technology can make a difference.

Employing smart home technology to reduce energy consumption not only saves you money, it reduces your family’s carbon footprint. Your HVAC, lighting, shading, and appliances systems can all be integrated and managed in one platform so that you can better manage and decrease your home’s energy use. 

Large-scale efforts, like installing solar panels, make a huge difference. (In some cases, you can store and even sell your unused power to the electric company.) A completely integrated home on a single platform like Savant allows the home owner to best manage and make changes to their home’s energy use while still enjoying the ease, comfort, and security of a smart home. Lighting solutions and shading systems like those from Lutron allow for direct control of light and heat management. Smaller efforts, like installing a smart thermostat and using more efficient light bulbs, also decrease your home’s overall energy consumption.

Over the next few weeks we’ll look more closely at how an integrated smart home can save you money and reduce your family’s carbon footprint.

To learn more about how your integrated smart home can reduce energy consumption, call us at Jackson Hole AV. We’d love to discuss the possibilities.