Energy savings sneak up on home automation

A few weeks ago, the EnOcean Alliance celebrated with fanfare its 200th member company, NanoSense, designer of air quality control sensors. NanoSense's use EnOcean and KNX technologies to regulate and optimize air quality inside buildings. The EnOcean Alliance was created just over three years ago, and according to keynote speaker Emmanuel Francois, marketing director for Western Europe, over 750 interoperable products are supported in over 200,000 buildings worldwide that use energy harvesting wireless technology to feed data back to building automation systems.

The sensors "harvest and store" tiny amounts of energy from motion, light or temperature differences, they then use it to wirelessly control lighting, heating and air conditioning systems. According to Francois' figures, about 20 to 30% of recurring savings can be achieved in new building installations, and up to 80 percent savings can be achieved in retrifit scenarios where maintenance, cabling requirements and installation time are considerably reduced[...]

In the so-called "smart-buildings", switches mounted inside window and door frames can send a short telegran to notify the air conditioning system that heating or cooling is no longer required whilst the windows remain open.
Presence (often infrared) and movement detectors together with light sensors act as relays to switch light on or to set a camera in action when someone enters a room, and turn it off when the room is empty again. Since every sensor bears a unique 32-bit identifier, an entire building can easily be mapped[...]

Even after a first installation, switches can be re-arranged within a room without re-wiring, they will remain wirelessly paired with their resprective appliances or lighting. This makes it easy to reconfigure office-space. Further tuning is enabled through dedicated software.

(Source EETimes, June 2011)