Whether you're sucking hundreds of watts from an outlet for an expanded home lab or simply wish to not spend as much running various appliances around the home, Home Assistant has a few tricks that can aid in cutting down energy usage. As someone who spends the majority of time at home, I needed to work on some ways to shave some pennies here and there, including smashing apart (figuratively speaking) my existing home lab for a more energy-efficient solution.

Home Assistant was pivotal in putting this plan into action. I've implemented several automations using motion sensors, temperature sensors, smart plugs, and lighting to reduce energy waste. Just how much am I saving? Currently, we're looking at around $250 per year, which is a fair chunk, primarily driven by electrical equipment, but once we move to our new house, our warmth during the coming winter months will be from storage heaters, so I've calculated some additional savings here.

Heating (and cooling) when needed

Turn it off when out and about

I'm as guilty as the next person for cranking their central heating thermostats up far too high. The wife also prefers a warm home, which can eat into energy costs. Unfortunately, due to how this rental property is configured with an older control system from Drayton, it doesn't integrate with Home Assistant. But I have managed to cut costs by lowering the temperature of which radiators that will attempt to heat each room.

The same goes for cooling us down, but here's where things get a little interesting. We have a few fans in the house, and I've hooked them all up to smart plugs. Using motion sensors and other detections, I've been able to make it so Home Assistant will keep the office fan going unless we both step out for longer than two minutes. The fan will then be switched off using the Innr smart plug, resuming should we return.

This schedule is also only active during the working week, so Monday to Friday for us both, and will only kick off should the room temperature surpass 25 degrees Celsius. What's more is the special loved one prefers to have a fan blowing around the room during the night, part for the breeze and part for the white noise. Since I'm not a fan (pun absolutely not intended) of this, a smart plug was installed so I can have the fan kick off when we're going to bed and then turn off during the night.

Once we move to the new house, it'll be storage heaters in every room due to the property being an older cottage. This is absolutely fine for us both since it removes the reliance on natural gas and enables us to power almost everything from renewable energy, should we be able to eventually install quite a solar array on the room and surrounding grounds with ample battery storage — our grid electricity supply is also guaranteed renewable.

We plan to pick up some Mill electric heaters to replace the old units already installed, which should be able to directly integrate into Home Assistant, and hopefully, we should be able to save money through more intelligent heating, even compared to our current central heating setup. Although these heaters are already smart enough, Home Assistant can add various functions, such as weather integration, to be more accurate when calling for heat.

Smart plugs are a Swiss Army Knife

One plug to rule them all

Smart plugs have an interesting history as more of an afterthought when it came to the smart home. Now, these capable and versatile devices can be used not only to control whether something plugged in has power or not, but they can even track energy usage and other stats. This has proven incredibly valuable for our home with all the technology running throughout each day.

I've got a few smart plugs running in the home. One is connected to the aquarium lighting system, which proves incredibly useful when a power cut hits and the system resets its internal clock. For some reason, Fluval didn't make it, so the scheduled lighting system kept its own time. The official app needs to be used to effectively reset it, but should we be on vacation or away, I can use the smart plug to cycle power at midnight to achieve the same result.

It even made me see just how much power I was effectively wasting by running what was effectively a micro data center with a cabinet of rack systems. I was aware of how much juice each server was pulling, but it's an entirely different thing to see it virtually represented in a graph and compared against other devices. This led me to consolidate our entire home lab into a single system.

I didn't include the total savings here in my total for this article since that would skew the results and inflate the number, but we managed to cut around 2kWh per day, saving nearly $365 each year. Everything else hooked up to smart plugs has its power cut entirely through the night if not required to be online. This helps shave precious watts off our total energy usage for the day, minimizing phantom power drain.

Motion sensors can also be used to great effect here, utilizing Home Assistant's incredible automation system to create various scenarios that can leverage your smart home devices.

The only hub you'll require

Home Assistant (almost) does it all

I started my smart bulb journey with a few Philips Hue lights. These were great at the time, but slowly, I saw just how much of a waste the hub is. This is because I'd need another hub to use some other branded bulbs if they weren't supported by the Philips Hue bridge. That's where Home Assistant came to the rescue. Not only does it support most lighting brands with its available integrations, but I can also create a Zigbee network to control them all.

This led me to completely remove two hubs that were running continuously to control all the smart lighting we had installed. After switching to a Zigbee adapter on the server and loading up the home with a few smart plugs that also acted as Zigbee repeaters, we were able to completely remove this unnecessary bloat from the smart home network. The same could be said about some other devices, too.

Depending on how you configure it, Home Assistant can be used to consolidate as much home hardware as possible. From integrating and scheduling robot vacuums to interacting with security locks, it's possible to save money almost everywhere at home with the right mindset, integrations, and a bit of know-how. The software can even integrate with your solar array and battery storage so you can clearly see what's pulling (and providing) power.

Our next home will be as energy-efficient as we can make it, relying on electricity as the only input and Home Assistant to ensure we're making the most of each and every watt.