Smarter Electricity Utilization -> Lower electricity bill - Using Zipabox?
Electricity meters are becoming smarter and smarter, and many electricity companies will be charging not only for accumulated usage, but also for sustained peak load.
Having a system which could e.g. switch off floor heating and hot water boiler while the washing machine is running, lowering the peaks and thus linearizing power consumption, will save the user quite a bit of money.
Norwegian company "SmartLab Hvaler" (http://www.effectmax.no) will be tapping in on this future market: They will install devices in people's homes, and send usage stats back to their servers. When they detect that peak power consumption can be lowered and/or that night-time low rate power can be utilized smarter, they'll turn off and on power-hungry stuff via Z-wave, ZigBee etc.
Lousy Google Translate:
Kickstarter project which is now a commercial product http://neur.io/ learns usage patterns and analyzes and identifies devices which are not individually monitored. Perhaps the Zipabox Power Expansion Module can be enhanced to do similar analysis which then in turn can be used to control Z-Wave devices via rules...
Most smart Z-wave power switches also contain internal power meters from which values are reported back to Zipabox and can be used for this very purpose. The current rule builder, however, is not very suitable for extensive programming. Given the versatility of the Zipato controllers, I would presume that the necessary functionality can be built into the controller software quite easily.
Being "smart" in this way, and "linearizing" and lowering the peaks of a home's power consumption, can potentially earn back the entire investment in Zipa- and Z-wave stuff in no time at all, which again could be a sales pitch for Zipato...
Could this be something for the Zipato future roadmap?
-I am quite certain that the present community can give the company not only vauable feedback, but also real life tests which would be invaluable in a commercial rollout...
Best regards,
Robert Hercz
I like this idea 
Robert,
That indeed will be required in the future, and certainly it could be very beneficial for Zipato. Unfortunately I highly doubt they could do it with the actual hardware they have, as they have mentioned in some posts, Zipabox has a limited hardware capacity to lower the cost and make it affordable, I think that unless all data would be sent directly and constantly to the cloud, analyzed by their servers and then let you take actions or chose how you want to start saving energy I highly doubt the zipabox can handle the job. Now, maybe the zipatile could make this job with the zipato energy meter but I think they certainly would have to update products. Good question to ask, if it's at least o their road map since products like Nest and Smarthings Hub are leaning heavily towards energy savings.
Robert,
That indeed will be required in the future, and certainly it could be very beneficial for Zipato. Unfortunately I highly doubt they could do it with the actual hardware they have, as they have mentioned in some posts, Zipabox has a limited hardware capacity to lower the cost and make it affordable, I think that unless all data would be sent directly and constantly to the cloud, analyzed by their servers and then let you take actions or chose how you want to start saving energy I highly doubt the zipabox can handle the job. Now, maybe the zipatile could make this job with the zipato energy meter but I think they certainly would have to update products. Good question to ask, if it's at least o their road map since products like Nest and Smarthings Hub are leaning heavily towards energy savings.
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