Answering your questions on smart homes

There are many reasons to consider making your home smarter. Not only can smart homes help make life easier, they can also help you to cut down on your energy use and spend.

But where to start?

Chris Lovatt, Chief Operating Officer of E.ON Energy Infrastructure Services, answers some of the questions commonly asked about smart homes.

A smart home is any residential property where you can control some or all of its systems remotely. That's anything from an app on your smartphone to smart speakers such as Alexa. Smart homes use secure technology to connect everything from your heating, lighting and sockets and security systems to fridges, blinds and sprinklers. If you're using a smart thermostat such as Bosch EasyControl or a smart doorbell, you're already living in a smart home.

If you enjoy using apps and have an interest in the latest technology, then a smart home can make your life easier, with basic chores taken care of.

Smart thermostats for example provide greater comfort, plus the convenience of remote use when you’re not at home. They can help you save on your energy bills by giving you more control to ensure you only use energy when you need to. 

Smart technology can be applied to a range of areas of your home, so smart sprinklers will know better than you do when your lawn needs watering; smart doorbells can save you waiting in for deliveries; smart security systems can improve safety while you're away. Smart sockets can be invaluable in checking whether you’ve left a device turned on when you’ve already headed out for the day.

If you use smart home technology correctly, it can certainly make your home more sustainable. Smart thermostats use intelligent scheduling, geolocation tracking, multi-room control and even the weather forecast to heat your home more efficiently, helping you to ensure you don't warm up an empty house or waste energy heating unused areas of your home.

Smart meters feed information about the amount of gas and electricity you're using direct to your energy supplier so you don't have to. They allow you to track whether you're keeping to your own budget and how your energy use compares to previous days, months or years.

E.ON Home is an app which lets you link systems across your home so that you can easily monitor your entire energy use. You can use it to check how much energy is being generated by your solar panels or stored in your battery, or simply use it to adjust your heating, all in one place.

Smart home technology is set to come into its own with more and more internet enabled devices, and one big growth area may well be homes for older people. Technologies such as smart floors that detect falls and alert carers and smart hobs that can tell when someone has forgotten about a meal they're cooking, as well as medical devices like smart watches that monitor blood pressure, will help older adults safely stay in their own homes for longer.

Smart homes are an exciting development with benefits for many of us, whatever our personal circumstances. The range of smart home solutions already in existence allow us to see our pets from the office and schedule our electric vehicle's battery to be charged ready for when we need to drive it.

And the technology is advancing continuously, which means in another few years artificial intelligence may mean our smart homes are anticipating our needs before we're even aware of them ourselves.

To find out more about making your home more sustainable, simply ask Alexa to open 'E.ON's Sustainable Home'.