At Alarm.com, we have more than 1 million homes signed on to our Connected Home platform, giving us plenty of insight about the power of connecting all the home’s critical devices together through a single technology platform. With a unified approach to energy management, you can boost your efficiency by making your smart thermostat smarter, giving homeowners more control over more power-hungry devices, and make energy management effortless with the latest automation technologies.

Smart-er Thermostats

The connected home makes smart thermostats even smarter. While single devices create schedules and patterns based on one room, the connected home uses data from all around the home to provide a more accurate and comprehensive automation schedule. The home’s security system includes motion detectors, door and window sensors (as well as an alarm’s status itself) can give a complete and real-time view of activity and occupancy. We call this “whole home data,” and it’s the backbone of creating highly accurate activity patterns and automation schedules for maximizing savings while maintaining your comfort.

Connect Everything

While smart thermostats hold great promise for reducing energy consumption, it’s important to know that heating and cooling no longer represent the biggest segment of energy use for the average U.S. home. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration appliances and electronics are the fastest growing segment today. To make a real dent in energy costs homeowners must also control and automate these power-hungry appliances and devices.

Comprehensive control over devices in the home gives the homeowner greater options to achieve ambitious energy savings goals. In addition to thermostats, home energy management automates lighting and shading, and even controls power use at each individual plug and any individual appliance connected to it. For instance, you can shut down your electric hot water heater for a few hours every night, or use a light control module on motion sensitive, outside security lights so they don’t waste power during day light hours. 

Effortless Automation

Creating this complex level of automation in home energy management is one thing -- and no small feat, at that — but the next big step is to make it easy, or even invisible. That’s where your smartphone can help with energy management. With a smartphone connected to your energy management platform, you can automatically adjust your home to a personalized energy savings mode by doing nothing more than taking your smartphone with you when you leave the house.

These types of geo-services help homeowners create effortless energy management practices.

Implementing these practices in your solar-powered home can go a long way toward getting the most out of your rooftop solar system, but they’re really just the beginning. In our next post, we’ll talk about the more advanced capabilities of a comprehensive home energy management platform, and the ways it can target power hungry devices and drive your energy bills even lower.

Jay Kenny is the vice president of Marketing for Alarm.com.