We had a chat with Chris Hunt, an energy coach for HEA. He explains how he is an energy coach for Californian residents for free.

In part 5 of this series, Chris shares the importance of having smart controls of your home. Just by turning stuff on and off in your home at the right time and with the right settings, people can really cut their energy bills substantially. He suggests that this is what a “smart home” can provide, and it can be done for less than $1,000 with smart plugs, voice assistants and various affordable devices.

This is part 5 and final article in the series. You can read part 4.

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CHRIS:  If you wanted to run your home with IOT devices and your smartphone, you could do that for very little money at this particular point. I’m talking about $1,000 for all the equipment. And I’ll give you an example, on my phone right now, I can bring up a collection of apps and I can run my watering system for the front and the back yard.

CHRIS:  I can run my lights for the front and the backyard. I can turn on my thermostat for two different furnaces, upstairs and downstairs, et cetera. And all of that is through an app on the phone. And all of these devices now are controllable by Alexa or Google home. You could actually have the benefit of what these very expensive smart homes have right now for very little money because all the devices are now talking to each other. The IOT or the home essentially is working. So you can have a garage door opener, your lights in your room, you can put them on schedules, et cetera.

CHRIS:  And that’s something that I should have mentioned at the top. What I really like is not just encouraging people to change their behavior, because that’s really difficult to do. But if you put controls in, you don’t have to worry about it. For example, my lights right now, they’re on a schedule and I set up my phone and I’ve got a Wemo clone, which is a smart plug. And I basically took my lighting system, which also was plugged into the wall of the transformer, and I’ve plugged it into this Wemo plug, which is about 25 bucks at Amazon. And now I can control the lighting, not only on its schedule, but if we have guests here and they’re leaving after the schedule, after the lights have gone off because it’s past 11 o’clock, I can just hit a button on my phone and it turns the lights back on again.

CHRIS:  There’s nice controls, and that’s where I think makes a difference, is people forget to turn things on or off. But if you have a control device in your house, it makes a huge difference in becoming regular and reducing the size of your bill.

TRAVIS:  For only $1,000? Well, we should probably just have a discussion just on smart home alone. I think smart homes is a pretty big topic, and people have tried different smart devices. Like I think the craziest one I’ve heard was a smart barbecue.

CHRIS:  Yeah, yeah.

TRAVIS:  I think people may have misguided associations with what a smart home means. They may think of a lot of wiring and expensive stuff. And you’re saying we can do it for $1,000?

CHRIS:  I really believe that. You can pick and choose the number of appliances you want to have intelligent. And I agree with you. I don’t see a smart barbecue and I don’t see even like a smart crock pot which is available right now.

TRAVIS:  Yeah, I don’t really want to talk to my crock pot.

CHRIS:  Yeah, exactly. But, if we all go … in California, if we all go to time of use pricing, then you’re saying, “You know what, I don’t want to stay up to whatever hour, even 11 o’clock to turn on my electric dryer, but I should run it at one minute past 11:00 PM or one minute past 9:00 PM or whatever. So there’s where you actually want to have a little bit of smart controls. As much as people think, “What a dumb idea to have a smart dryer.” What I want is to be able to say, “No, I want this to go on it’s delicate cycle and I want it to run for exactly 50 minutes and I want it to start at 11:01 PM.” And that’s something that can’t be done right now. But I bet you somebody’s working on it, ’cause that would be a smart use of that device.

CHRIS:  You don’t have to talk to a device, you can basically use an app on your phone to do the control. Amazon has just made it easier for people to use that, and I’ll confess, I have my own qualms about having a listening device like that available in the background all this time. So I actually unplug mine, when I’m not using it, when I’m not testing it. But I’ve been able to use Alexa, the echo spot and Alexa and a smart plug to turn on a recirc pump for exactly five minutes. When I give this command, “Alexa turn on the shower,” it will start up my recirc pump and it will turn it off exactly five minutes later because you don’t need the recirc pump to be running all the time, you just need it to get the hot water flowing to the shower.

CHRIS:  So that’s the problem with recirc pumps. They run 24/7 unless you have ’em on a timer. Well, this little script will basically say, “Okay, turn the recirc pump on just to get everything going and then turn it off right after that.” And the other, the companion piece to this is a smart plug. You plug that into the wall and you plug whatever you want into that smart plug and then you control it from this little key pod that you’ve got in your hand, essentially.

TRAVIS:  Well, great. Let’s, yeah, let’s have another chat about smart home for $1,000 or even $200! All right, Chris, thank you for your time. I learned a lot and I hope all the listeners out there also did as well about energy use in their home and how to cut that bill in by 15% or even more.