Why Build All This Home Monitoring Mechanism

There are a number of reasons I built this system. Here are some:

To be able to improve the performance of a system, it helps a lot to monitor that performance. We want to reduce our power consumption and to do this it helps to understand how we are consuming power. Once we saw the patterns of our energy usage, we made some changes and now consume half the power we used to. After making some big changes, by watching the subsequent patterns, we were able to make some incremental improvements and further reduce our power bill.

When we travel, it is helpful and comforting to know how our home is doing. While in Australia for three months in 2005, we watched the video surveillence cameras. We saw, for example, that someone had left the pool light one day. That is a powerful light and so it consumes a lot of power (300 Watts). We told the gardener and he switched it off the next day. It might have stayed on for three months if we hadn't seen that.

To be able to spot and fix problems more quickly. For instance, we got a new radient heating system installed in 2005. It had some subtle problems with the flow reversing in some of the loops. This caused one bedroom to get too hot. We could see the problem happening on the temperature graphs. We showed it to our heating contractor and, armed with this information, was able to quickly diagnose and fix the problem. Sometimes our sewer lateral gets clogged and effluent backs up into the shower drains. This system detects this and sends us email should this happen again (it hasn't backed up since I put in this mechanism). I expect that the alerts will happen well before we would notice any shower drains backing up.

To automate some tasks. For example, we now maintain the pool ourselves. When we had a pool service do it, the technician had to record the pool filter pressure every week. Now that pressure is monitored continuously and plotted. So we can look at the graph and know when we need to backflush.

To be able to debug issues and fine-tune the control system for our hybrid gas/solar heating system. If we didn't have such good instrumentation, it would take more time, more trial and error, to fine tune the controls.

Because its fun (for me). I'm a life-long hacker/engineer, especially of embedded systems.

Because I had some hope in 2007 of starting a company to do low cost streaming data collection for non technical users. My home was sort of a test bed.