My Home – The intelligent way

European consumers can save billions of Euros – simply by making sure that appliances in their homes only consume electricity when in use. The secret is to eliminate unnecessary standby consumption and ensure that lighting, ventilation, heating systems and air conditioners only operate when required. One way to do this is for consumers to use a correctly programmed home control and monitoring system.

This paper describes an international initiative taken by the Danish Electricity Saving Trust to develop a sizeable consumer market for standardised energy management devices and monitoring equipment. The key point is to offer consumers simple and affordable control devices that allow them to monitor and manage their homes easily and efficiently, with energy savings as an added bonus. It is also important that these devices can communicate wirelessly with each other – regardless of the manufacturer.

The basic idea is to offer consumers the opportunity to set up their own home energy management system on a step-by-step basis, based on Plug and Play products and wireless communication.

The Trust has taken the first step towards an integrated solution for this concept with the creation of the My Home Internet portal. At My Home, users can draw a floorplan of their home and equip it with electrical appliances and furniture. Options for controlling and monitoring electrical appliances in the home can then be added to the floorplan via a simple Internet browser, which consumers can use wherever they are.

The Trust is also developing an XML communication protocol alongside My Home, which hopefully will become a good de facto standard for communication between residential gateways, online portals and third-party suppliers.

The Danish Electricity Saving Trust is an independent not-for-profit organisation that helps Danish consumers and public sector institutions save energy.

The home control concept
Cost and user-friendliness are major obstacles to installing efficient private home control systems. The market is in a transition phase, however, with many manufacturers now supplying devices to private consumers. Many of these devices support the Z-Wave standard, and they can communicate with each other using this standard, irrespective of manufacturer. However, setting up and configuring these systems in private homes is often still too complicated for ordinary users, and set-up procedures differ from manufacturer to manufacturer. The Danish Electricity Saving Trust hopes that its concept will help eliminate these obstacles.

The Trust’s concept involves offering consumers a common standard for controlling devices without tying them to one manufacturer. In order to achieve this, the Trust requires that the devices comply with the terms of its recommended Energy Saving Label, which generally ensures both uniformity and compatibility, but also guarantees energy efficient solutions for consumers that are both user-friendly and easy to set up and configure.

Energy Saving Label
The Trust recommends products that both save energy and meet its quality requirements. Recommended products can be found on the Trust’s website and in printed material. See www.savingtrust.dk.

Manufacturers may also use the recommended Energy Saving Label on their products. However, this endorsement is subject to the fact that the products covered satisfy a number of conditions laid down by the Trust.

In general, a product needs to:

• Save energy in a straightforward way
• Be relevant to the general public
• Be safe and comply with regulatory requirements.

Specific requirements for wireless equipment:

• Residential gateways, sensors, actuators and remote controls must be approved by the Z-Wave Alliance and be labelled with the Z-Wave logo, thereby ensuring that products from different manufacturers can communicate
• The recommended residential gateways should be able to control other sensors, actuators and remote controls recommended by the Trust
• The recommended gateways should be able to upload measurements (e.g. meter data) to the Trust’s server, and receive data and information from the server using the data format laid down by the Trust
• The recommended residential gateways should be capable of receiving automatic firmware upgrades to enable control of new types of products and the use of the latest software developed by the Trust
• The Trust will promote the above components on its website at www.savingtrust.dk
• The Trust will develop freeware applications for residential gateways, sensors, actuators and remote controls and data tools for analysing meter data.

Before recommending a product, the Trust must receive the necessary documentation from the manufacturer. The Trust will also continuously monitor recommended products on the market, and will display them at www.savingtrust.dk. Subject to a separate agreement, the Trust will allow manufacturers of recommended products to use the Trust’s logo, software, etc., on a worldwide basis.

About Z-Wave
Nothing is more frustrating than buying electronic products that cannot interface with other products that you own. When you invest in technology for your home, you want to be sure that it will work seamlessly with what you already have, and can communicate with any other components you might want to add in the future. The Trust has chosen Z-Wave as its wireless control protocol because it is a widely accepted technical standard that ensures complete interoperability between all Z-Wave devices, no matter what the brand.

The main features of Z-Wave are the use of open communication protocols and low power consumption. Z-Wave is marketed worldwide and is a strong player on the American market.

The Trust’s main reasons for recommending Z-Wave:

• Hardware comprises an inexpensive chip for integration into devices
• Low power consumption makes battery-powered sensors and switches a reality, even for extended operating periods
• 30-metre operating distance can be considerably extended thanks to the built-in repeat function that allows signals to be relayed from any other Z-Wave chip
• Rapidly growing market share with increasing numbers of manufacturers adopting the technology
• Alliance of companies using Z-Wave (Z-Wave Alliance Group) cooperates on protocol development, thereby ensuring connectivity between Z-Wave-equipped devices via open standards
• Z-Wave Alliance and communication protocol are available to everyone at low cost
• Well-defined communication protocols and an open approach create opportunities for a wide variety of third-party products, thereby ensuring competition in the market and ultimately lower prices for consumers.