From Guest Blogger Delicia Warren: How Technology Can Make Your Home Greener

There are many ways that you can try to be greener and reduce your energy consumption. You can take the bicycle instead of the car, recycle your home waste and compost your waste food. Making your home itself greener and more energy efficient place doesn’t necessarily mean adding solar panels or a new boiler, there are other smaller things you can do.

Smart Home Hub

If you want to make your home more efficient, then the best way is to make things automated or easy to turn off when not needed. That is where something like a smart home hub can help; they can use voice commands to control gadgets and appliances around your home.

By doing this, you can reduce your energy consumption and save energy. There are a couple of main types of the smart hub from Amazon and Google that do relatively the same things. There are apps that you can download that allow them to control smart gadgets and do other tasks for you such as organize your shopping list on your smartphone. If you are unsure, you can get help from sites like technologydreamer.com.

Smart Thermostats

One of the best ways to control your energy consumption is to use a smart thermostat. Although these have been around for a while, they have been given a major upgrade recently with new models becoming more interactive and automated. They are now capable not only of listening to your commands via the smart home hub, but they can even detect whether you are home or not. It makes your heating and water use far more efficient and therefore saving energy and money.

Smart Appliances

Many of the main electronic manufacturers are now understanding the consumers drive to save energy, especially in the home. With that in mind, they are producing appliances that are becoming more energy efficient. Some of the best are the smart versions that not only take orders from you via the home hub but are also able to think for themselves. They can measure how much washing you have put in and adjust the wash cycle accordingly. They are also able to self-diagnose problems using the internet, which cuts down on unnecessary engineer calls.

Smart Lighting

For the past few years, household lighting has been evolving. The traditional bulbs that were not energy efficient have been superseded by more efficient fluorescent bulbs and LED lighting. Some of the LED versions are also enabled with Bluetooth to make them smarter so your smart hub can control them. It means that you can turn them off from any room in the house, and via your mobile, while you are out.

These are just a few of the ways an automated home can save you not only time but also energy. If you want to go a little further, you could consider installing more efficient heating and special adaptors to your faucets to save water consumption. Then you will truly be turning your home green.

Author: Delicia Warren is a freelance writer, passionate about the environment, organic farming and food production. An advocate for a holistic approach to the world’s problems, she has a particular interest in the small changes individuals can make to their lifestyle to minimize their environmental footprint.