I've been using HA for a while; having my home just "do things" for me without asking is fantastic. My lights turn on to exactly the levels I want when I enter a room, my grass and my plants get watered automatically, heating and cooling happens only when it needs to. There are lots of benefits. Plus, it's just a fun hobby.
One thing I didn't expect, though, is all the interesting things you can learn when you have sensors monitoring different aspects of you home or the environment.
- I can always tell when someone is playing games or streaming video (provided they're transcoding the video) from one of my servers. There's a very significant spike in temperature in my server room, not to mention the increased power draw.
- I have mmWave sensors in an out-building that randomly trigger at night, even though there's nobody there. Mice, maybe?
- Outdoor temperatures always go up when it's raining. It's always felt this way, but now it's confirmed.
- My electrical system always drops in voltage around 8AM. Power usage in my house remains constant, so maybe more demand on the grid when people are getting ready for work?
- I have a few different animals that like to visit my property. They set off my motion sensors, and my cameras catch them on video. Sometimes I give them names.
- A single person is enough to raise the temperature in an enclosed room. Spikes in temperature and humidity correspond with motion sensors being triggered.
- Watering a lawn takes a lot more water than you might expect. I didn't realize just how much until I saw exactly how many gallons I was using. Fortunately, I irrigate with stored rain water, but it would make me think twice about wasting city water to maintain a lawn.
- Traditional tank-style water heaters waste a lot of heat. My utility closet with my water heater is always several degrees hotter than the surrounding space.
What have you discovered as a result of your home automation? While the things I mentioned might not be particular useful, they're definitely interesting, at least to me.
My old furnace was hilariously oversized for the house.
One of the nifty things about smart thermostats like Ecobees is that you can pull usage data from their web portal. I grabbed a CSV file covering a cold snap last year that reached a 100-year record low, and using Excel I summed up the total heat output while we were at that low.
The furnace was only running 50% of the time, even when it was with a couple degrees of as cold as it's ever been where I live.
Needless to say, when I got a new system installed I made sure it was more properly sized, and given that I had a convenient empirical measurement of exactly how many btus I actually needed in the worst case as scenario, that was easily done.
Having an oversized furnace really isn't a bad thing, and only having it run half the time sounds like a good thing to me.
A little headroom ain't bad, but it had three times the required heating capacity for my area's "design day" low, which meant that for most of the winter it was kicking on for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour and then leaving massive cold spots in the house, because the thermostat was smack in the middle and all the walls were bleeding heat.
My new heat pump is just about 2x the design day heat requirement, but that also means it's got capacity to handle extreme lows without resorting to resistance heat, and in any case it's fully modulating so the house has stayed quite comfortable so far.