LED lights consume not much power. How does that compare with the power used by a wifi + motion detector system running 24/7?
It's pretty clear that an HVAC system that is on a timer can save considerable power. I have a programmable thermostat for that reason, but the user interface for it is so awful I need to reread the manual every time. It would be better if it was wifi and presented a web page as a UI.
I also bought a programmable cat feeder. Again, one needs a manual to figure it out. What is wrong with those engineers? You shouldn't need a freakin' manual to set up a cat feeder. And the UI couldn't be satisfied with 5 buttons, no, you've got to do chording and hold buttons for various amounts of time to do various things. It's complete madness.
(I don't want the cat feeder hooked to the internet, though. I'm suspicious the cat has been plotting against me, and it might be able to coordinate with other cats via the cat feeder interface, which could spark the cataclysm.)
> LED lights consume not much power. How does that compare with the power used by a wifi + motion detector system running 24/7?
It's barely a rounding error. Sleeping the microcontroller, average current draw is a couple mA. LED lights draw around 500 mA.
Regarding the HVAC, what I made is more focused on keeping the temperature balanced by taking a weighted average of temperatures across the house, with the weights adapting to where people are, similar to the Ecobee thermostats but DIY. It also has a web interface where you can view temperatures and power usage, which is far more useful than I thought it would be.
It's pretty clear that an HVAC system that is on a timer can save considerable power. I have a programmable thermostat for that reason, but the user interface for it is so awful I need to reread the manual every time. It would be better if it was wifi and presented a web page as a UI.
I also bought a programmable cat feeder. Again, one needs a manual to figure it out. What is wrong with those engineers? You shouldn't need a freakin' manual to set up a cat feeder. And the UI couldn't be satisfied with 5 buttons, no, you've got to do chording and hold buttons for various amounts of time to do various things. It's complete madness.
(I don't want the cat feeder hooked to the internet, though. I'm suspicious the cat has been plotting against me, and it might be able to coordinate with other cats via the cat feeder interface, which could spark the cataclysm.)