How to easily save electricity with Home Assistant

In these times when everything is increasing in price, especially electricity, I took up the challenge to see how much we could save without us feeling a decrease in what we can do when we are at home.

I started looking into all our devices being in standby mode in periods we don’t use them, meaning at night when we are sleeping or when nobody is at home. I then used our House Mode functionality to turn these devices off and on depending on the current house mode.

So now these devices are turned off when entering Away or Night mode:

• Sonos Speakers are turned off at the plugs
  Our Sonos speakers are turned off at the plugs, so they don’t use any electricity in standby mode. They use around 4 – 6 watts each per hour in standby mode. At night one is however turned on, because we use it for our perimeter protection to notify us of any breach.
  
• IP Cameras in our kids room
  They only turn off when we are away (so not in Night mode). If there is a perimeter breach when we’re not at home, they are also turned on right away, so we have camera views of the rooms.
  
• Computers and TVs are turned off at the plugs
  Our computers and our TVs are turned off at the plugs, so they don’t use any electricity in standby mode.
  
• Selected smart light bulbs and smart LED strips are turned off at the plugs
  

When going into Home mode (from either Night or Away mode) all of the devices are turned back on again.

Besides the turning off/on part, I also changed all automations that turns on lights in our rooms based on motion detection:

• All automations now turn off the light quicker than before if no motion is registred.
• All automation is checking the lux level in the rooms, and then only turn on the lights if the room is dark enough for lights.

All of these changes have saved us around 2 kWh per day. That doesn’t sound of much, but with the current electricity prices around 4 – 7 DKK (0,54 – 1,00 USD) it will mean a lot over a period of a year. Especially when we don’t feel the change because we only changed stuff when we are not at home or we are at sleep.

Outside our Home Assistant system, I also went from two 24-ports network switches to one 24-ports switch instead, and my Synology NAS is automatically closing down at 23.00 and starting up again at 8.00 (only used for storage).

In total with all changes we have gone from a power consumption of 700 – 800 watts per hour at night (when we sleep) to around 550 watts instead, and it’s the same case when we’re not at home. That a pretty solid electricity saving for about 2 hours of work.