The Home of the Future

It’s often said that a man’s home is his castle, and that’s not far from the truth. A home should be a sanctuary from all the stress and pressure of daily life, offering comfort, warmth, relaxation and entertainment. But the ways that homes provide those things are changing, and you may be surprised at just how clever houses are getting. Okay, so the houses themselves aren’t getting clever, but the technology that we’re putting into them is. So let’s take a look at what’s just around the corner – and arriving now – in our search for domestic bliss.

THE SEAT OF POWER

If our homes are our castles, then it follows that our sofas are the thrones. When we want to relax, many of us simply flop down on the sofa and switch on the TV. But what if you could do a lot more from the comfort of your sofa than just watching TV?

It’s now possible to control pretty much everything in the home without having to leave the comfort of the sofa. Home AV and automation installations are no longer just for city workers and Premier League footballers, and with the latest wireless technology, it’s never been easier to control all the technological facets from one place.

You can spend as much money as you want to automate your home, but it doesn’t have to cost the earth. Sonos, for example, has completely revolutionised digital music in the home. In a matter of minutes you can set up a Sonos system that will allow you to listen to a multitude of digital music sources in any number of rooms in your house.

A Sonos system lets you pipe music from any source to anywhere in the house, all via a stylish wireless controller

With a Sonos system you can control all your music, all around your house from a single Sonos remote controller. You can even use an iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote controller simply by downloading the free Sonos app. And if you’re tapping away on your laptop, you can use the Sonos software on that too.

But a system like Sonos is just the tip of the iceberg. If you really want to drag your house into the 21st century, something like Control4 might be the answer. With a Control4 system, not only can you control your music, but you can operate your home cinema, draw the blinds on your windows, dim the lights in your bedroom, change the temperature in your home, or even open your front door – all without ever leaving your sofa.

A system like Control4 isn’t just for couch potatoes, either. Rather than using an alarm clock, you can program the system to open your blinds or slowly bring the lights up in your bedroom when it’s time to wake up. At bedtime, you might configure the system to power down your AV equipment and ensure that all the lights in the house are switched off. And most importantly, you can make sure that the doors and windows are locked without having to physically patrol your home to check.

BE BIG BROTHER

Like home automation installations, CCTV systems used to be playthings for the rich and paranoid. Now, even the cash-strapped paranoid can keep an eye on their home 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world. CCTV is old hat; it’s all IP cameras now. Because these cameras sit on a network, all you need in order to see what they see is a web browser.

Companies like Axis have been selling IP cameras for some time now, but more recently, far greater focus has been put on home installations. Not only does that mean that the prices have dropped to a level that consumers can afford, but also that the cameras themselves are far easier to install, setup and use.

Panasonic’s latest line of IP cameras take no more than a few minutes to configure, and with some simple port forwarding on your home router, you’ll be able to see what’s going on in your home from anywhere. Not only can you view the cameras remotely, but you can also control them, so if you want to pan around a room, or get a sweeping view of your garden, the controls are all there.

Panasonic’s IP phone can view and control up to 20 IP cameras, letting users keep an eye on their homes from the office

Most IP cameras can be set to start recording only when they detect motion, which will save you capturing hours of nothing happening. They record to a memory card resident in the camera itself, to a storage device or computer on your home network or, for ultimate security, to a remote storage device. The latter is the best option since it means that, if you do get burgled, the thieves can’t steal the device that recorded the break in.

Since all you need is a web browser to see what your IP cameras are seeing, you can just as easily use a smartphone or – if you’re feeling indulgent – an Apple iPad. But if you’re looking for the ultimate gadget to complement your array of cameras around your home, look no further than the Panasonic KX-NT400 phone. This telephone features a colour touch-screen that can be used to display the feeds from any of the cameras around your house. And if you’re feeling particularly lazy, you can even use it to open the front door – once you’ve checked who’s knocking of course.

SMARTEN UP YOUR HOME

The home of the future isn’t just about gadgets, though. It’s also about being more aware of what your house is doing and the habits of the people inside it. We’re constantly told about how much power the average household wastes, but for most people it’s hard to quantify that waste. When our utility bills come in, they’re either a nasty shock or a pleasant surprise, but more often than not, you’ll receive an estimated bill, leaving you none the wiser about how much you actually owe.

Now, you can change all that. Technology can ensure that you never receive another estimated bill, while also avoiding those knocks on the door from meter reading men or women, which always seem to come at the most inconvenient times. But most importantly, you can keep accurate track of all the power usage in your home from pretty much anywhere in the world. All you need is a smart meter.

First:utility customers can keep track of their electricity use via their iGoogle home page

First:utility has been offering its customers free smart meters for some time now, and the company is planning to roll this service out to most of the UK this year. A smart meter will replace your traditional electricity and gas meters, and send regular data back to first:utility via a dedicated remote link. This means that no one has to come and read the meter because it is being constantly read remotely.

The real beauty of the smart meter is that first:utility makes all the data available to the customer. That means that you can check on your power usage via the company’s online portal anytime you like. Electricity readings are updated every half hour, while gas readings are taken on a daily basis. Not only does this give you an accurate indication of what your bill will be, but it also means that you can monitor power usage in your home and, hopefully, find ways to reduce it.

To make monitoring your power usage even easier, first:utility has recently partnered with Google, allowing its customers to view their usage via Google’s PowerMeter gadget. It integrates with a user’s iGoogle home page, and gives an updated reading of electricity usage every half hour. Google PowerMeter doesn’t show gas usage, but considering that only updates once per day, it shouldn’t be much of an issue.

An Energy Monitoring Unit costs £35 and gives a comprehensive breakdown of electricity use

The combination of a smart meter and Google PowerMeter gives consumers all the tools they need to make a positive change to their power usage. Changes in behaviour can be seen on a day-to-day basis, helping consumers to reduce their utility bills by changing the way they live in their houses. And if you want to keep track of your usage while you’re relaxing on your sofa and don’t want to break out your laptop, worry not. First:utility offers a remote Energy Monitoring Unit that can sit on your coffee table and tell you how much electricity you’re using while watching your 50in plasma TV. It’s not as accurate as the smart meter but it provides a live reading of how much electricity is being used second-by-second, along with the cost per hour and even the amount of carbon dioxide being generated by your electricity consumption.

HARVEST THE SUN

While a smart meter and energy monitor are great devices for helping you become more power efficient, you’re still pulling all that power from the national grid. If you really want your house to be eco-friendly and save you money, it really needs to be producing some power by itself. This doesn’t mean buying one of those wind turbines from your local garden centre – they’re rarely efficient and seem to be popular only with people who want show their neighbours how environmentally friendly they are. If you really want your home to create power, you’ll need to pull it out of the sky.

Solar power is nothing new; it has been touted as the answer to dwindling fossil fuels for some time now. It’s an infinitely abundant, clean power source, just waiting to be put to good use. Unfortunately, while the idea of solar power has always been an attractive one, in practice it has proved too difficult and expensive to harvest, but not anymore.

The latest photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, like the Kyocera KC200GT, can be fitted to almost any residential home and won’t require a second mortgage to cover the cost. That’s not to say that a solar panel installation is cheap – it’s not – but it’s not prohibitively expensive, especially when you consider the benefits are both environmental and financial.

A serious installation like this will be beyond most budgets, especially since the government scrapped its 50% solar grant

Solar panel installation specialist, www.evoenergy.co.uk, estimates that a solar panel installation for an average residential home will cost around £10,000 including VAT. That cost includes the supply of the panels, the roof mounting system, the inverter that turns the solar energy into electricity and all labour costs. The government used to offer a 50 per cent grant for residential renewable energy installations, but unfortunately that has now been scrapped.

You can still get some help with the cost of installation, though. A Low Carbon Building Programme Grant will pay up to £2,500 towards the initial cost of your installation. Just bear in mind that certain aspects of your home also need to be compliant in order to receive the grant. But the real financial benefit will come once you’re solar panels are up and running.

You might be thinking that the point of solar panels is to create and use your own power, but there’s more to it than that. Going some way to redress the scrapping of the 50 per cent grant, the government has recently implemented Solar feed-in tariffs. This means that your utility company is obliged to buy every unit of power you produce from your solar panels at a set rate, even if you’re actually using that power in your own home.

If you produce more power than you need in your home, you can have it fed into the national grid and get paid at an even higher rate. The point of the feed-in tariff is to encourage people to invest in solar power, by making the panels pay for themselves over a shorter period of time. The feed-in tariffs will only be enforced for the next 25 years, which the government hopes will encourage consumers to invest in renewable energy sooner rather than later.

BUYING THE HOME OF THE FUTURE

Although there’s a lot you can do to your home to make it more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, if you want to live in a home with zero carbon emissions, you’ll have to buy a new one. Many builders are experimenting with low carbon emission homes, which are becoming more attractive to buyers for both environmental and economic reasons. One such builder is Miller Homes, and the company has recently completed a batch of low-carbon homes in Basingstoke.

The Miller Zero homes, as they’re called, total five plots on a small residential estate. Each home adheres to a different level of carbon neutral certification, with the Level 6 home achieving zero carbon emissions. Besides the obvious environmental advantages to a zero-carbon-emission home, there’s an added financial benefit, since a Level 6 new house attracts no stamp duty.

The Miller Zero homes use various energy-saving and -capturing technologies to reduce carbon emissions

So what does it take to build a zero-emission home? Quite a lot, it would appear. It starts with the materials used to build the house in the first place. Walls are thicker, with more insulation to ensure that barely any heat escapes into the outside world. In the same vein, every single window in the house is triple glazed, again ensuring that the heat inside the house stays there. An added bonus is that the triple glazing keeps all the outside noise where it belongs – outside.

The roof of the house is constructed with PV solar panels built into it. This will ensure that renewable energy is used to power the home at least some of the time. Miller aims for the majority of daytime electricity to be provided by the solar panels. There’s a smart meter installed, naturally, so the homeowners can make sure they’re using their power as efficiently as possible.

Renewable water usage is also high on the agenda, with a 2,000 litre water tank underneath the lawn. This collects rain water, which is then filtered and used by the washing machine and toilets, ensuring that clean, drinking water isn’t wasted. Other water-saving measures include lower overflows in baths and basins, and aerated taps which give the illusion of high water flow, but actually limit the amount of water used.

There are a couple of ways to generate heat while keeping emissions to a minimum. The first method is a ground source heat pump, which works like a reverse refrigerator. Two bore holes are drilled into the back garden, pipes are laid and refrigerant is pumped through them. Because the ambient temperature below ground is higher, the refrigerant will take on that heat. It is then pumped through a series of heat exchangers, which raise the temperature significantly enough to heat a tank of water. Because the only power needed for this system is to drive the pump and compressor, the heat captured far outweighs the energy required to create it.

The other heating option is a biomass boiler that runs on wood pellets. The pellets are fed into a hopper, but they are not instantly burned. The boiler will only take on more pellets to burn when there is a need for more heat, if say, someone starts to run a bath, or turns on the under-floor heating. There will be carbon emissions released as the wood is burned, but this is offset by the CO2 that was absorbed during the tree’s life.

Low-wattage lighting is used throughout the house. Not only does this reduce power usage, but low-power bulbs and LEDs have a far longer lifetime than traditional bulbs and halogen spots. Even the air is used to good effect, with hot air being pumped from the kitchen and bathroom through a heat exchanger and out of the building. The stored heat is then used to warm up fresh air from outside, to ensure that the air in the house is always fresh, without reducing the ambient temperature. Basically, nothing goes to waste.

THE BIG PICTURE

Not too many years ago the home of the future was a vision of automation and entertainment, where all your needs were taken care of without you lifting a finger. That picture has changed somewhat, and today’s ideal home of the future has a far wider brief. The good news is that we don’t need to look too far into the future to live in the type of home that only existed in science fiction a decade ago.

Whether you’re concerned with reducing your carbon footprint or controlling all your in-house entertainment from the sofa, the technology is all there right now. You’ll have to keep your expectations and desires in check, as many of these technologies don’t come cheap. However, it’s clear that as new homes are built, we’ll see much of it installed as standard. In fact, government legislation states that, by 2016, all new-build houses need to adhere to Level 6 Code with zero carbon emissions.

The other pieces of the puzzle will fall into place if consumer demand is high enough. If new home buyers cite features like integrated IP cameras or home-automation systems as important, then more builders will look to install this kind of technology into new homes. As always, early adopters will pay a premium, but eventually, what’s considered a luxury or frivolous today might just become commonplace in all homes.

On the following page we look at Panasonic’s ‘Concept Home’ – the Eco Ideas House in Tokyo

PANASONIC’S FUTURE HOME

If you’re interested in futuristic homes and find yourself in Japan, take a trip to the Panasonic Centre in Tokyo. There you’ll find the Eco Ideas House, which is designed to make full use of Panasonic’s diverse portfolio of technology in order to reduce carbon emissions to an absolute minimum while creating a comfortable, practical living environment.

The Eco Ideas House is at the cutting edge of low-carbon living

Power is produced by a combination of solar and fuel cell technology. The roof is covered with PV solar panels which can account for up to 85 per cent of the house’s power needs. The rest of the power is generated by the fuel cell, which runs on hydrogen. All the electricity from the solar panels and fuel cell is pumped into a large lithium-ion accumulator battery, where it is stored until the house requires it.

Heat-pump technology is used to capture heat in the air and transfer it where it is needed. The vacuum insulation panels in the walls ensure that the house stays warm in the winter, while also remaining cool in the summer. Water consumption is reduced through the use of reduced water appliances, like Panasonic’s tilted drum washing machine. Even the glass and surfaces in the house are designed to be stain resistant, to reduce the degree of cleaning and, consequently, water usage.

The functions of the house can be controlled via touch screen panels that allow you to view security cameras, alter the lighting, or even start the shower running so that it’s warm by the time you step into it. There’s even full videoconferencing facilities, so you can be just as productive working from home as you would be in the office.

Ambient light sensors ensure that lighting is always at an optimum level, balancing the house lighting with natural light flowing from the windows and the ceiling. And of course all the lighting comes from low-power, long-life LEDs.

If you’re thinking that Panasonic’s Eco Ideas House is just a marketing gimmick for its visitor centre, think again. Panasonic actually builds homes in Japan through its PanaHome arm. It’s unlikely that we’ll start seeing PanaHome constructions in the UK, but it does go to show that we’re playing catch up in the race to build the home of the future.