As a team we are always looking for cool new ways of using DriveWorks technology and a few months ago when Maria moved to her new house, Rob, Glen and Philip embarked on a very different but exciting project…. a Home Automation project.
The new house didn’t have any form of heating installed when Maria bought it and as a person who cares about the environment and loves technology, Maria wanted to explore what options might be available for a solution that combined the two.
The ability to regulate for efficiency and automate what goes on in the house were important priorities. The result? A home automation system that monitors and controls the temperature settings in EVERY room of the house individually. And all driven by DriveWorks from anywhere in the world.
So how exactly does this home automation system work with DriveWorks?
Solar Panels have been installed on the garage roof, wireless temperature sensors placed in every room (and one outside) providing realtime logging to a database monitored by DriveWorks. Through rules-based automation, DriveWorks then reads these values and displays them. Then, depending on what the user has set the ideal temperature to be at for a particular room, an electrical heater will remain off, or turn on to bring the room up to the required temperature.
Rooms can be grouped together using the ‘Group Admin’ button, e.g. placing all reception rooms, or all bedrooms in a group together to be set to the same temperature. The optimum temperature can be varied throughout the day, and for different times of the week.
This particular example has simple controls; changing settings for the week and weekend, or advanced controls giving the ability to change settings for each day.
Of course, if Maria wants it to be warmer or colder than the set temperatures, it’s really easy to make changes.
Using DriveWorks Live Maria can even access the Home Automation Control Panel from anywhere in the world and on any device, eg iPhone, iPad, Android etc.
So she could be at an airport getting ready to fly home from an international Reseller visit, holiday in Greece or just the DriveWorks office and want to be sure that the her house is the right temperature when she gets back. All she needs to do is just logon to the home automation system and adjust to the ideal temperature, what a perfect welcome home!
Her sons are pretty impressed with it too as they can set the heating in their rooms ahead of time if they decide to come home from university for the weekend!
As DriveWorks is a rules based system, it is easy to see other inventive uses of DriveWorks within the house (e.g. lights, electrical equipment) and beyond.